From acoustics to grammar: Perceiving and interpreting grammatical prosody in adolescents with Asperger Syndrome

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Abstract

We report findings concerning the understanding of prosody in Asperger Syndrome (AS), a topic which has attracted little attention and led to contradictory results. Ability to understand grammatical prosody was tested in three novel experiments. Experiment 1 assessed the interpretation of word stress, Experiment 2 focused on grammatical pauses, and Experiment 3 tested the discrimination of the question contour. Acoustic tasks were also used to assess the perception of pitch, duration, intensity and prosodic contours. AS participants performed as well as typically developing controls in all our tasks. This provides support in favour of the view that grammatical prosody is spared in 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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