Production of syllable stress in speakers with autism spectrum disorders

• Type of Material: Article
• Authors: Rhea Paul, Yale Child Study Center; Nancy Bianchi, CT Public Schools; Amy Augustyn, Florida State University; Ami Klin, Emory University; Fred Volkmar, Yale Child Study Center
• Language: English
• Date: 2008-01-01
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Publication Version: Author Accepted Manuscript (After Peer Review)
• Copyright Statement: © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
• License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International
• Final Published Version (URL): http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.rasd.2007.04.001
• Title of Journal or Parent Work: Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders
• ISSN: 1750-9467
• Volume: 2
• Issue: 1
• Start Page: 110
• End Page: 124
• Grant/Funding Information: Preparation of this paper was supported by Research National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)Grant P01-03008; by the STAART Center grant U54 MH66494 funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD); the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS); the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD); and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS); by NIDCD MidCareer Development grant K24 HD045576 awarded to Dr. Paul; as well as by the National Alliance for Autism Research.
• Keywords: PERVASIVE DEVELOPMENTAL DISORDERS; Education & Educational Research; Life Sciences & Biomedicine; LANGUAGE; Prosody; CHILDREN; COMMUNICATION; SPEECH; Syllable stress; Science & Technology; INTONATION; Education, Special; Autism; Rehabilitation; Psychiatry; Psychology, Developmental; Psychology; PROSODY; Social Sciences
• Research Categories: Psychology, Developmental; Health Sciences, Mental Health

Abstract

This paper reports a study of the ability to reproduce stress in a nonsense syllable imitation task by adolescent speakers with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), as compared to typically developing (TD) age-mates. Results are reported for both raters' judgments of the subjects' stress production, as well as acoustic measures of pitch range and duration during stressed and unstressed syllable production. Results reveal small but significant differences between speakers with ASD and typical speakers in both perceptual ratings of stress and instrumental measures of duration of syllables. The implications of these findings for understanding prosodic deficits in ASD are discussed.