“…Recent research has, however, begun to document impairments. Prosody characteristics noted for persons with ASD have included monotonous speech as well as sing-song speech, aberrant stress, atypical pitch patterns, abnormalities of rate and volume of speech, and problematic quality of voice (e.g., Baltaxe, 1981; Baltaxe, Simmons, & Zee, 1984; Shriberg, Paul, McSweeny, Klin, Cohen, & Volkmar, 2001). Findings obtained with the Profiling Elements of Prosodic Systems-Children instrument (PEPS-C; Peppé & McCann, 2003), a computerized battery of tests consisting of decontextualized tasks that span the linguistic-pragmatic-affective continuum, include poorer performance by children with ASD compared to typically developing (TD) children, particularly on affective and pragmatic prosody tasks (Peppé, McCann, Gibbon, O'Hare, & Rutherford, 2007; McCann, Peppé, Gibbon, O’Hare, & Rutherford, 2007).…”