From acoustics to grammar: Perceiving and interpreting grammatical prosody in adolescents with Asperger Syndrome
Section snippets
Producing prosody
Given the abundance of evidence highlighting prosodic abnormalities in ASDs, this area of research has been greatly under-explored (for a review, see McCann & Peppe, 2003). Yet, both Kanner's (1943) and Asperger's (1944) initial descriptions of the disorder mentioned abnormal prosody, using adjectives such as “odd”, “monotonous”, “singsong”, “unmodulated”, etc. Asperger, whom we quote at length below, clearly emphasises these issues in his seminal paper (translated in Frith, 1991):
The
Perceiving prosody
Autobiographical reports such as Donna Williams’ (1994) also mention serious difficulties, on the perception side, in dealing with prosodic cues:
‘Speak to me through my words,’ I asked Dr. Marek. I wanted to cut down the struggle in putting mental pictures into words.
‘Can you take the dancing out of your voice and not pull faces so you don’t distract me from what you’re saying?’ (p. 95)
However, the perception of prosody has received less attention than the production side, except in the case of
General method
This section presents (a) the battery of tests that were used in the study; (b) details of the recording procedure for our auditory stimuli and (c) information about the general testing procedure common to all three experiments. Finally, we provide details of the participants who were tested in the study.
Experiment 1 – lexical stress
In this experiment, we assess the participant's ability to select the most appropriate pronunciation of an utterance on the basis of the stress pattern assigned to a disyllabic noun or verb. The target items used in the experiment belong to pairs of Noun-Verb homographs with different stress patterns (e.g., “He got the best PREsent he could dream of.” – “I preSENT the late-night news.”). An equal number of control items, which do not belong to such pairs of homographs, was added (e.g., “He got
Experiment 2 – chunking compounds
In this experiment, we assess the participant's ability to take rhythm into account in chunking sequences of two or three words appropriately and to associate the sequence to the right set of pictures. Three word-types were used: Compounds (“Dragonfly and carrot”); Split-Compounds (“Dragon, fly and carrot”) and Controls (“Fly, apple and carrot”). These stimuli appeared in three experimental conditions (see Fig. 2).
In the Ambiguous Mismatch condition, the participants heard a compound and saw
Experiment 3 – question contour
In this experiment, we assess the participant's ability to distinguish questions from declaratives on the basis of prosodic and syntactic cues. All participants took part in this experiment. In the “Syntax” condition, both intonation and word order indicate that the utterance is a question (e.g., “Is this a dog?”), in the “Prosody” condition, the word order is identical to that of a declarative (e.g., “This is a dog?”) and the only clue that the utterance as a question comes from intonation; in
General discussion
The literature on the perception of grammatical prosody in HFA and AS has not yet provided a fully conclusive picture. Conflicting evidence has been put forward, some suggesting that grammatical abilities are intact, and some suggesting possible impairments. In this paper, we have argued that the inconsistency of the results obtained in the literature might have arisen for methodological reasons (for a similar argument, see McCann and Peppé’s (2003) recent review mentioning recurring
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the children in North Hill House (Frome, UK) and Henry Fanshaw School (Dronfield, UK) as well as to Andy Cobley and Teresa Roche, their respective head teachers, for their valuable help. We also wish to thank Dorothy Bishop for permission to use her Dino task programme, Jenny Thomson and Usha Goswami for providing a modified version of the task, and Catherine Jones for valuable advice on the programme. Many thanks, also, to Steve Nevard for technical support, Tim Wharton for the
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2018, Research in Developmental DisabilitiesCitation Excerpt :In contrast, studies investigating discrimination based on prosody have yielded mixed findings. Some have reported impairments (e.g., McCann, Peppé, Gibbon, O’Hare, & Rutherford, 2007; Peppé, McCann, Gibbon, O’Hare, & Rutherford, 2007), with others reporting no impairment (Boucher, Lewis, & Collis, 2000; Brennand et al., 2011; Chevallier, Noveck, Happé, & Wilson, 2009; Doyle-Thomas, Goldberg, Szatmari, & Hall, 2013; Grossman, Bemis, Skwerer, & Tager-Flusberg, 2010; Jones et al., 2011; O’Connor, 2007; Ozonoff, Pennington, & Rogers, 1990) or even enhancement (Järvinen-Pasley, Wallace, Ramus, Happé, & Heaton, 2008). To give an impression of the mixed findings, Le Sourn-Bissaoui, Aguert, Girard, Chevreuil, and Laval (2013) reported that youth with ASD performed similar to typical controls in discriminating utterances based on prosodic cues yet had difficulties when asked to interpret positive emotions in varying situational contexts.
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2014, Research in Autism Spectrum DisordersCitation Excerpt :Thus by following the general ASD literature (McCann & Peppé, 2003; Paul, Augustyn, Klin, & Volkmar, 2005; Shriberg et al., 2001; Tager-Flusberg et al., 2005), we contend that both the intonation cues in our study and the stress cues in the Diehl et al. (2008) study serve the same function as grammatical prosody. Moreover, our study is consistent with a number of other ASD studies in English (Chevallier, Noveck, Happé, & Wilson, 2009; Paul et al., 2005; Shriberg et al., 2001), which demonstrated that grammatical prosody is relatively spared in children with ASD (as compared to their well-documented deficits in the pragmatic or affective aspects of prosody). Importantly, children with ASD's relative strength in grammatical prosody agrees with the general observation that the development of the grammatical aspects of language remains a relative strength in children with ASD, in comparison to their impaired communicative functions or pragmatic skills.
Attention to emotional tone of voice in speech perception in children with autism
2013, Research in Autism Spectrum DisordersCitation Excerpt :Our failure to find evidence of a deficit in perceiving contrasts in speech prosody in children with ASD is in conflict with Peppé et al. (2007), who reported lower than normal performance in high-functioning children with ASD. However, reflective of the inconsistent and sparse literature in prosodic perception in children with ASD, our findings are in agreement with Chevallier et al. (2009), Grossman et al. (2010), Järvinen-Pasley et al. (2008), and Ploog et al. (2009). In these studies, low- and high-functioning children with ASD were shown to possess adequate, sometimes even superior, perception of affective and/or grammatical prosody with a variety of stimuli and different test paradigms.
The use of prosody during syntactic processing in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders
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