Production of syllable stress in speakers with autism spectrum disorders

doi:10.1016/j.rasd.2007.04.001

Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders

Volume 2, Issue 1, January–March 2008, Pages 110-124

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rasd.2007.04.001 Get rights and content

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.

Section snippets

Participants

Speech samples were collected for 66 subjects; 46 with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and 20 with typical development (TD). These participants with ASD comprised all the individuals with any form of ASD who were seen in conjunction with ongoing studies of high functioning autism at the Yale Child Study Center's Developmental Disabilities Section within a 2-year time period. To qualify for the high functioning study, subjects were required to have a diagnosis within the ASD spectrum, a verbal

Results

Correlational analysis was used to determine whether there were relationships among any of the subjects’ diagnostic characteristics (e.g., PIQ, VIQ, Vineland and ADOS scores) and results of the analysis of stress production. The only variable that showed any significant correlation with measures of stress production was Verbal IQ (r = −0.33 and −0.45 with stressed and unstressed accent range, respectively). For this reason, all analyses were done using VIQ as a covariate, to control for its

Discussion

The findings of this analysis of production of stress in nonsense syllables by speakers with autism revealed that there were small but significant differences in the ability to produce syllables perceived by listeners as stressed and unstressed in this imitation task. We also found greater variability in the perceptual analysis for subjects with HFA and PDD-NOS than those with TD or AS. Instrumental analysis revealed that there were no significant differences in the pitch ranges produced within

Acknowledgements

We wish to express our appreciation to Prof. Frank Sansone for his assistance in utilizing the CSL program for these analyses, to Prof. David Snow for his guidance in the use of the accent range measure, to Jeffrey Weihing for his help in refining our analysis procedures, as well as to Elizabeth Schoen and Carolyn Gosse for their help in establishing reliability and preparing data for analysis. We also extend our gratitude to John Bianchi for his assistance with data formatting and analysis.

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Citation Excerpt :
However, they had a difficulty in reducing the duration of T0 with the suffix “zi”, while their TD peers could realize a significant long-short durational pattern. This finding corroborates the temporal atypicality in ASD (Chen et al., 2021), i.e, the duration lengthening phenomenon (Diehl & Paul, 2013; Filipe et al., 2014) or insignificant duration prominence (Paul et al., 2008). In a nutshell, Mandarin-speaking autistic children with language delays were able to integrate underlying tonal categories and realize context-dependent pitch contours of both T3 sandhi and T0 at least in the pitch height.
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Production of syllable stress in speakers with autism spectrum disorders

Abstract

Section snippets

Participants

Results

Discussion

Acknowledgements

Journal of Communication Disorders

Journal of Communication Disorders

Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders

Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders-TR

Use of contrastive stress in normal, aphasic, and autistic children

Journal of Speech and Hearing Research

The use of primary sentence stress by normal, aphasic, and autistic children

Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders

Communication deficits in the adolescent with autism, schizophrenia, and language-learning disabilities

A comparison of language issues in high-functioning autism and related disorders with onset in children and adolescence

Do children with autism acquire the phonology of their peers? An examination of group identification through the window of bilingualism

First Language

Meaning and structure of language

An introduction to English prosody. Forschung & Studium Anglistik 1

Prosodic systems and intonation in English

Emerging language in autistic children

The use of intonation to communicate in pervasive developmental disorders

Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry

Articulation disorders in children with high functioning autism

Learning how to mean: Explorations in the development of language

Autistic disturbances of affective contact

Nervous Child

The acoustic analysis of speech

Brief report: Interrater reliability of clinical diagnosis and DSM-IV criteria for autistic disorder: Results of the DSM-IV Autism Field Trial

Journal of Autism & Developmental Disorders

The pervasive developmental disorders: Nosology and profiles of development

Tennessee test of rhythm and intonation patterns

Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders

Suprasegmentals

The autism diagnostic observation schedule—generic: A standard measure of social and communication deficits associated with the spectrum of autism

Journal of Autism & Developmental Disorders