Perception and Production of Prosody by Speakers with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Communication Profile of a Minimally Verbal School-Age Autistic Child: A Case Study

Purpose The present clinical focus draws on an intrinsic case study to provide a thick description of the communication profile of John, a 9-year-old minimally verbal autistic student. Method Specifically, traditional behavioral assessments, classroom video observations, and semistructured interviews were used to gather information regarding John's communication profile and potential sensory-motor differences. Results Convergent evidence indicated that John's expressive profile was characterized by single words, emergent word combinations, some conventional gestures, and a low frequency of communicative initiations. Concomitant language comprehension challenges and poor intelligibility associated with motor speech impairment were also indicated. His sensory-motor profile was marked by fine motor impairment, relative strengths in gross motor abilities, and sensory differences across visual, hearing, and tactile modalities. Conclusion Direct implications for supporting minimally verbal autistic students like John include the need to (a) consider sensory-motor influences on social interaction and (b) support flexible use of multimodal communication resources, including augmentative and alternative communication. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.12202448.

Requirements for Robotic Interpretation of Social Signals “in the Wild”: Insights from Diagnostic Criteria of Autism Spectrum Disorder

The last few decades have seen widespread advances in technological means to characterise observable aspects of human behaviour such as gaze or posture. Among others, these developments have also led to significant advances in social robotics. At the same time, however, social robots are still largely evaluated in idealised or laboratory conditions, and it remains unclear whether the technological progress is sufficient to let such robots move “into the wild”. In this paper, we characterise the problems that a social robot in the real world may face, and review the technological state of the art in terms of addressing these. We do this by considering what it would entail to automate the diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Just as for social robotics, ASD diagnosis fundamentally requires the ability to characterise human behaviour from observable aspects. However, therapists provide clear criteria regarding what to look for. As such, ASD diagnosis is a situation that is both relevant to real-world social robotics and comes with clear metrics. Overall, we demonstrate that even with relatively clear therapist-provided criteria and current technological progress, the need to interpret covert behaviour cannot yet be fully addressed. Our discussions have clear implications for ASD diagnosis, but also for social robotics more generally. For ASD diagnosis, we provide a classification of criteria based on whether or not they depend on covert information and highlight present-day possibilities for supporting therapists in diagnosis through technological means. For social robotics, we highlight the fundamental role of covert behaviour, show that the current state-of-the-art is unable to characterise this, and emphasise that future research should tackle this explicitly in realistic settings.

PRESS-Play: Musical Engagement as a Motivating Platform for Social Interaction and Social Play in Young Children with ASD

Musical experiences are ubiquitous in early childhood. Beyond potential benefits of musical activities for young children with typical development, there has long been interest in harnessing music for therapeutic purposes for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, there is debate as to the effectiveness of these approaches and thus a need to identify mechanisms of change (or active ingredients) by which musical experiences may impact social development in young children with ASD. In this review, we introduce the PRESS-Play framework, which conceptualizes musical activities for young children with ASD within an applied behavior analysis framework consistent with the principles of naturalistic developmental behavioral interventions. Specifically, the PRESS-Play framework proposes that musical activities support key elements of evidence-based approaches for social engagement including predictability, reinforcement, emotion regulation, shared attention, and social play context, providing a platform for delivery and receipt of social and behavioral instruction via a transactional, developmental approach. PRESS-Play considers that these factors may impact not only the child with ASD but also their interaction partner, such as a parent or peer, creating contexts conducive for validated social engagement and interaction. These principles point to focused theories of change within a clinical-translational framework in order to experimentally test components of social-musical engagement and conduct rigorous, evidence-based intervention studies.

Vocal Communication With Canonical Syllables Predicts Later Expressive Language Skills in Preschool-Aged Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Purpose We examined associations between vocal communication with canonical syllables and expressive language and then examined 2 potential alternative explanations for such associations. Method Specifically, we tested whether the associations remained when excluding canonical syllables in identifiable words and controlling for the number of communication acts. Participants included 68 preverbal or low verbal children with autism spectrum disorder (M _age = 35.26 months). Results Vocal communication with canonical syllables and expressive language were concurrently and longitudinally associated with moderate to strong (R ²s = .13-.70) and significant (ps < .001) effect sizes. Even when excluding spoken words from the vocal predictor and controlling for the number of communication acts, vocal communication with canonical syllables predicted expressive language. Conclusions The findings provide increased support for measuring vocal communication with canonical syllables and for examining a causal relation between vocal communication with canonical syllables and expressive language in children with ASD who are preverbal or low verbal. In future studies, it may be unnecessary to eliminate identifiable words when measuring vocal communication in this population. Following replication, vocal communication with canonical syllables may be considered when making intervention- planning decisions.

Mechanisms of voice control related to prosody in autism spectrum disorder and first-degree relatives

Differences in prosody (e.g., intonation, rhythm) are among the most obvious language-related impairments in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and significantly impact communication. Subtle prosodic differences have also been identified in a subset of clinically unaffected first-degree relatives of individuals with ASD, and may reflect genetic liability to ASD. This study investigated the neural basis of prosodic differences in ASD and first-degree relatives through analysis of feedforward and feedback control involved in the planning, production, self-monitoring, and self-correction of speech by using a pitch-perturbed auditory feedback paradigm during sustained vowel and speech production. Results revealed larger vocal response magnitudes to pitch-perturbed auditory feedback across tasks in ASD and ASD parent groups, with differences in sustained vowel production driven by parents who displayed subclinical personality and language features associated with ASD (i.e., broad autism phenotype). Both ASD and ASD parent groups exhibited increased response onset latencies during sustained vowel production, while the ASD parent group exhibited decreased response onset latencies during speech production. Vocal response magnitudes across tasks were associated with prosodic atypicalities in both individuals with ASD and their parents. Exploratory event-related potential (ERP) analyses in a subgroup of participants during the sustained vowel task revealed reduced P1 ERP amplitudes in the ASD group, with similar trends observed in parents. Overall, results suggest underdeveloped feedforward systems and neural attenuation in detecting audio-vocal feedback may contribute to ASD-related prosodic atypicalities. Importantly, results implicate atypical audio-vocal integration as a marker of genetic risk to ASD, evident in ASD and among clinically unaffected relatives. Autism Res 2019, 12: 1192-1210. © 2019 The Authors. Autism Research published by International Society for Autism Research published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: Previous research has identified atypicalities in prosody (e.g., intonation) in individuals with ASD and a subset of their first-degree relatives. In order to better understand the mechanisms underlying prosodic differences in ASD, this study examined how individuals with ASD and their parents responded to unexpected differences in what they heard themselves say to modify control of their voice (i.e., audio-vocal integration). Results suggest that disruptions to audio-vocal integration in individuals with ASD contribute to ASD-related prosodic atypicalities, and the more subtle differences observed in parents could reflect underlying genetic liability to ASD.

The feasibility and appropriateness of a peer-to-peer, play-based intervention for improving pragmatic language in children with autism spectrum disorder

Purpose: This study trialled a play-based, peer-to-peer intervention with children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to identify suitable instruments for measuring changes in pragmatic language following the intervention, and evaluate preliminary effectiveness. It also aimed to investigate the appropriateness of the intervention for participants. Method: Ten children with ASD, their typically developing peers, and parents participated. The Pragmatics Observational Measure (POM), Social Emotional Evaluation (SEE) and Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech Communication (PEPS-C) measured the participant's social communication skills before, after, and 2-months following the intervention. Parent interviews were conducted two months after the intervention and responses were analysed using a thematic approach. Result: Children demonstrated gains in pragmatic language on the POM (χ²(3) = 11.160, p = 0.011) and related higher-level language on the SEE (χ²(2) = 6.686, p = 0.035). The PEPS-C did not produce any significant results. Parent interview responses indicated the intervention was appropriate for the children and families involved. Conclusion: The intervention warrants further investigation of effectiveness with a more robust research design. Consideration should be given to using observational measures of pragmatic language away from the clinic environment to evaluate generalisation, and future development of the intervention might consider variations in playmates and group size.

Four Social Brain Regions, Their Dysfunctions, and Sequelae, Extensively Explain Autism Spectrum Disorder Symptomatology

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a challenging neurodevelopmental disorder with symptoms in social, language, sensory, motor, cognitive, emotional, repetitive behavior, and self-sufficient living domains. The important research question examined is the elucidation of the pathogenic neurocircuitry that underlies ASD symptomatology in all its richness and heterogeneity. The presented model builds on earlier social brain research, and hypothesizes that four social brain regions largely drive ASD symptomatology: amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), temporoparietal cortex (TPC), and insula. The amygdala's contributions to ASD largely derive from its major involvement in fine-grained intangible knowledge representations and high-level guidance of gaze. In addition, disrupted brain regions can drive disturbance of strongly interconnected brain regions to produce further symptoms. These and related effects are proposed to underlie abnormalities of the visual cortex, inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), caudate nucleus, and hippocampus as well as associated symptoms. The model is supported by neuroimaging, neuropsychological, neuroanatomical, cellular, physiological, and behavioral evidence. Collectively, the model proposes a novel, parsimonious, and empirically testable account of the pathogenic neurocircuitry of ASD, an extensive account of its symptomatology, a novel physiological biomarker with potential for earlier diagnosis, and novel experiments to further elucidate the mechanisms of brain abnormalities and symptomatology in ASD.

Brief Report: Acoustic Evidence for Increased Articulatory Stability in the Speech of Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Subjective impressions of speech delivery in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) as monotonic or over-precise are widespread but still lack robust acoustic evidence. This study provides a detailed acoustic characterization of the specificities of speech in individuals with ASD using an extensive sample of speech data, from the production of narratives and from spontaneous conversation. Syllable-level analyses (30,843 tokens in total) were performed on audio recordings from two sub-tasks of the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule from 20 adults with ASD and 20 pairwise matched neuro-typical adults, providing acoustic measures of fundamental frequency, jitter, shimmer and the first three formants. The results suggest that participants with ASD display a greater articulatory stability in vowel production than neuro-typical participants, both in phonation and articulatory gestures.

An acoustic study of lexical stress contrastivity in children with and without autism spectrum disorders

In this exploratory study, we examined stress contrastivity within real word productions elicited via picture naming in 20 children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and 20 typical peers group-wise matched on age and vocabulary. Targets had a dominant pattern of lexical stress beginning with a strong-weak pattern (SW: 'caterpillar', 'butterfly') or a non-dominant pattern of lexical stress beginning with a weak-strong pattern (WS: 'tomato', 'potato'). Children produced each target twice (n = 320 productions). Acoustic measures were made for the duration, fundamental frequency, and intensity of the first two vowels for each word production. For vowel duration and fundamental frequency, children with ASD and typical peers produced a similar magnitude of stress contrastivity for SW and WS words. However, there was a significant group difference in the way contrastivity in intensity was realised for WS words whereby children with ASD produced less stress contrastivity than typical peers. Bayesian analyses were in line with our interpretation of our frequentist analyses.

Generalization of content and emotional prosody across speakers varying in gender in youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder

AIMS

We employed a discrimination-choice procedure, embedded in a custom-made videogame, to evaluate whether youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), including nonverbal individuals, distinguish sentences on the basis of emotional tone-of-voice and generalize linguistic information across speaker gender.

METHODS AND PROCEDURES

Thirteen youth with ASD (7-21 years) and 13 age-matched typical controls heard pairs of pre-recorded sentences varying in lexical content and prosody (e.g., enthusiastic "Dave rode a bike'' vs. grouchy "Mark held a key''). After training to select a target sentence, participants heard test probes comprising re-combinations of the content and prosodic features of the sentences. Interspersed generalization trials used a voice opposite in gender to the voice used in training.

OUTCOMES AND RESULTS

Youth with ASD were less accurate than controls in discriminating sentences based on emotional tone-of-voice. Nonverbal and verbal youth did not differ in this regard. The ASD group showed only slight decrements in generalizing to the opposite-gender voice.

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

The finding of intact generalization of linguistic information across male/female speakers contrasts with the widely held view that autism is characterized by deficits in generalization. This suggests the need to test generalization under varying task demands to identify limits on performance.

Characteristics of the emissive prosody of children with autism spectrum disorder

ABSTRACT Objective: to analyze the prosodic aspects of speech in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Methods: 21 children aged 3 to 6 years participated and were divided into three groups: Group 1 - children with Autism Spectrum Disorder; Group 2 - children with language delay; Group 3 - children with typical language development. Three judges performed a subjective evaluation of the emissive prosody (characterization of pitch, loudness, sentence stress, stressed syllable and others) of the children during interaction time (video recording and use of specific protocols). The equality of proportions test was applied for group comparison (α=0.01). Results: the prevalence of a history of delay for speaking the first words was high in Groups 1 and 2. Regarding the prosodic characteristics, all Group 1 children had difficulties in the use of the stressed syllable, and some in the accentuation of the sentence. On the other hand, no Group 3 children showed these changes and few Group 2 children presented excessively stressed syllable. Conclusion: inappropriate stressing of words seems to be one of the features in the differential diagnosis of verbal children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Infant-Mother Acoustic-Prosodic Alignment and Developmental Risk

PURPOSE

One promising early marker for autism and other communicative and language disorders is early infant speech production. Here we used daylong recordings of high- and low-risk infant-mother dyads to examine whether acoustic-prosodic alignment as well as two automated measures of infant vocalization are related to developmental risk status indexed via familial risk and developmental progress at 36 months of age.

METHOD

Automated analyses of the acoustics of daylong real-world interactions were used to examine whether pitch characteristics of one vocalization by the mother or the child predicted those of the vocalization response by the other speaker and whether other features of infants' speech in daylong recordings were associated with developmental risk status or outcomes.

RESULTS

Low-risk and high-risk dyads did not differ in the level of acoustic-prosodic alignment, which was overall not significant. Further analyses revealed that acoustic-prosodic alignment did not predict infants' later developmental progress, which was, however, associated with two automated measures of infant vocalizations (daily vocalizations and conversational turns).

CONCLUSIONS

Although further research is needed, these findings suggest that automated measures of vocalizations drawn from daylong recordings are a possible early identification tool for later developmental progress/concerns.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

https://osf.io/cdn3v/.

Grammatical Word Production Across Metrical Contexts in School-Aged Children's and Adults' Speech

PURPOSE

The purpose of this study is to test whether age-related differences in grammatical word production are due to differences in how children and adults chunk speech for output or to immature articulatory timing control in children.

METHOD

Two groups of 12 children, 5 and 8 years old, and 1 group of 12 adults produced sentences with phrase-medial determiners. Preceding verbs were varied to create different metrical contexts for chunking the determiner with an adjacent content word. Following noun onsets were varied to assess the coherence of determiner-noun sequences. Determiner vowel duration, amplitude, and formant frequencies were measured.

RESULTS

Children produced significantly longer and louder determiners than adults regardless of metrical context. The effect of noun onset on F1 was stronger in children's speech than in adults' speech; the effect of noun onset on F2 was stronger in adults' speech than in children's. Effects of metrical context on anticipatory formant patterns were more evident in children's speech than in adults' speech.

CONCLUSION

The results suggest that both immature articulatory timing control and age-related differences in how chunks are accessed or planned influence grammatical word production in school-aged children's speech. Future work will focus on the development of long-distance coarticulation to reveal the evolution of speech plan structure over time.

Speaker-Versus Listener-Oriented Disfluency: A Re-examination of Arguments and Assumptions from Autism Spectrum Disorder

We re-evaluate conclusions about disfluency production in high-functioning forms of autism spectrum disorder (HFA). Previous studies examined individuals with HFA to address a theoretical question regarding speaker- and listener-oriented disfluencies. Individuals with HFA tend to be self-centric and have poor pragmatic language skills, and should be less likely to produce listener-oriented disfluency. However, previous studies did not account for individual differences variables that affect disfluency. We show that both matched and unmatched controls produce fewer repairs than individuals with HFA. For silent pauses, there was no difference between matched controls and HFA, but both groups produced more than unmatched controls. These results identify limitations in prior research and shed light on the relationship between autism spectrum disorders and disfluent speech.

Lay Listener Classification and Evaluation of Typical and Atypical Children's Speech

Verbal children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often also have atypical speech. In the context of the many challenges associated with ASD, do speech sound pattern differences really matter? The current study addressed this question. Structured spontaneous speech was elicited from 34 children: 17 with ASD, whose clinicians reported unusual speech prosody; and 17 typically-developing, age-matched controls. Multiword utterances were excerpted from each child's speech sample and presented to young adult listeners, who had no clinical training or experience. In Experiment 1, listeners classified band pass filtered and unaltered excerpts as "typical" or "disordered". Children with ASD were only distinguished from typical children based on unaltered speech, but the analyses indicated unique contributions from speech sound patterns. In Experiment 2, listeners provided likeability ratings on the filtered and unaltered excerpts. Again, lay listeners only distinguished children with ASD from their typically-developing peers based on unaltered speech, with typical children rated as more likeable than children with ASD. In Experiment 3, listeners evaluated the unaltered speech along several perceptual dimensions. High overlap between the dimensions of articulation, clearness, and fluency was captured by an emergent dimension: intelligibility. This dimension predicted listeners' likeability ratings nearly as well as it predicted their judgments of disorder. Overall, the results show that lay listeners can distinguish atypical from typical children outside the social-interactional context based solely on speech, and that they attend to speech intelligibility to do this. Poor intelligibility also contributes to listeners' negative social evaluation of children, and so merits assessment and remediation.

Emotional Prosody Processing in Epilepsy: Some Insights on Brain Reorganization

Drug resistant epilepsy is one of the most complex, multifactorial and polygenic neurological syndrome. Besides its dynamicity and variability, it still provides us with a model to study brain-behavior relationship, giving cues on the anatomy and functional representation of brain function. Given that onset zone of focal epileptic seizures often affects different anatomical areas, cortical but limited to one hemisphere, this condition also let us study the functional differences of the left and right cerebral hemispheres. One lateralized function in the human brain is emotional prosody, and it can be a useful ictal sign offering hints on the location of the epileptogenic zone. Besides its importance for effective communication, prosody is not considered an eloquent domain, making resective surgery on its neural correlates feasible. We performed an Electronic databases search (Medline and PsychINFO) from inception to July 2017 for studies about prosody in epilepsy. The search terms included “epilepsy,” “seizure,” “emotional prosody,” and “vocal affect.” This review focus on emotional prosody processing in epilepsy as it can give hints regarding plastic functional changes following seizures (preoperatively), resection (post operatively), and also as an ictal sign enabling the assessment of dynamic brain networks. Moreover, it is argued that such reorganization can help to preserve the expression and reception of emotional prosody as a central skill to develop appropriate social interactions.

Executive Functions and Prosodic Abilities in Children With High-Functioning Autism

Little is known about the relationship between prosodic abilities and executive function skills. As deficits in executive functions (EFs) and prosodic impairments are characteristics of autism, we examined how EFs are related to prosodic performance in children with high-functioning autism (HFA). Fifteen children with HFA (M = 7.4 years; SD = 1.12), matched to 15 typically developing peers on age, gender, and non-verbal intelligence participated in the study. The Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech-Communication (PEPS-C) was used to assess prosodic performance. The Children's Color Trails Test (CCTT-1, CCTT-2, and CCTT Interference Index) was used as an indicator of executive control abilities. Our findings suggest no relation between prosodic abilities and visual search and processing speed (assessed by CCTT-1), but a significant link between prosodic skills and divided attention, working memory/sequencing, set-switching, and inhibition (assessed by CCTT-2 and CCTT Interference Index). These findings may be of clinical relevance since difficulties in EFs and prosodic deficits are characteristic of many neurodevelopmental disorders. Future studies are needed to further investigate the nature of the relationship between impaired prosody and executive (dys)function.

Ripe for solution: Delayed development of multisensory processing in autism and its remediation

Difficulty integrating inputs from different sensory sources is commonly reported in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Accumulating evidence consistently points to altered patterns of behavioral reactions and neural activity when individuals with ASD observe or act upon information arriving through multiple sensory systems. For example, impairments in the integration of seen and heard speech appear to be particularly acute, with obvious implications for interpersonal communication. Here, we explore the literature on multisensory processing in autism with a focus on developmental trajectories. While much remains to be understood, some consistent observations emerge. Broadly, sensory integration deficits are found in children with an ASD whereas these appear to be much ameliorated, or even fully recovered, in older teenagers and adults on the spectrum. This protracted delay in the development of multisensory processing raises the possibility of applying early intervention strategies focused on multisensory integration, to accelerate resolution of these functions. We also consider how dysfunctional cross-sensory oscillatory neural communication may be one key pathway to impaired multisensory processing in ASD.

The impact of atypical sensory processing on social impairments in autism spectrum disorder

Altered sensory processing has been an important feature of the clinical descriptions of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). There is evidence that sensory dysregulation arises early in the progression of ASD and impacts social functioning. This paper reviews behavioral and neurobiological evidence that describes how sensory deficits across multiple modalities (vision, hearing, touch, olfaction, gustation, and multisensory integration) could impact social functions in ASD. Theoretical models of ASD and their implications for the relationship between sensory and social functioning are discussed. Furthermore, neural differences in anatomy, function, and connectivity of different regions underlying sensory and social processing are also discussed. We conclude that there are multiple mechanisms through which early sensory dysregulation in ASD could cascade into social deficits across development. Future research is needed to clarify these mechanisms, and specific focus should be given to distinguish between deficits in primary sensory processing and altered top-down attentional and cognitive processes.

Comprehension of "Narrow Focus" by Adolescents in the Autism Spectrum

OBJECTIVE

The study compared the performance of adolescents with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) to that of age-matched peers with typical development (TD) and cognitive language-matched peers with TD on measures of identification and comprehension of "narrow focus."

PARTICIPANTS

Forty-nine participants, 17 autistic, 17 TD peers matched for age and sex, and 15 TD children matched for expressive vocabulary participated in the study.

METHOD

The Hebrew Narrow Focus Test (HNFT) was used. The HNFT includes 3 subtests. The first subtest (A) required identification of the stressed word in the sentence based on psychoacoustic abilities alone. The second (B) and third (C) subtests required understanding the meaning of focused stress in different contexts. In subtest B, the meaning of "narrow focus" was to contrast other possibilities related to the lexical-grammatical role of the stressed word in the sentence, whereas in subtest C, the meaning was to indicate a mistake.

RESULTS

ASD participants showed reduced performance compared to peers across all the subtests of the HNFT, but similar performance compared to TD children in subtests A and B and better performance on subtest C. A significant correlation was found between the Raven test for assessing nonverbal intelligence and subtests B and C of the HNFT in the group of adolescents with ASD.

CONCLUSIONS

Comprehension of narrow focus in adolescents with ASD who study in a special educational system is related to their cognitive-linguistic abilities and not to the autistic condition by itself or to its severity.

The Comprehension of Syntactic and Affective Prosody by Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder Without Accompanying Cognitive Deficits

The present study investigates the comprehension of syntactic and affective prosody in adults with autism spectrum disorder without accompanying cognitive deficits (ASD w/o cognitive deficits) as well as age-, education- and gender-matched unimpaired adults, while processing orally presented sentences. Two experiments were conducted: (a) an on-line sentence completion task containing local subject/object ambiguities and (b) an affective prosody task exploring the comprehension of six emotions. The syntactic prosody task revealed that the experimental group performed similar to the control group on the fillers and the object condition. On the other hand, the ASD w/o cognitive deficits group manifested lower accuracy compared to the unimpaired controls in the subject reading condition, as well as slower reaction times in all conditions. In the affective prosody task, the experimental group performed significantly worse than the controls in the recognition of the emotion of surprise, whereas no differences between the experimental and the control group were attested in the recognition of all other emotions. A positive correlation was found between the two tasks in the ASD w/o cognitive deficits group. Thus, individuals with ASD w/o cognitive deficits face slight difficulties with the decoding of prosody, both the syntactic and the affective one. More specifically, these difficulties are attested in the most difficult conditions, i.e. the subject reading and the emotion of surprise.

Production and perception of emotional prosody by adults with autism spectrum disorder

This study examined production and perception of affective prosody by adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Previous research has reported increased pitch variability in talkers with ASD compared to typically developing (TD) controls in grammatical speaking tasks (e.g., comparing interrogative vs. declarative sentences), but it is unclear whether this pattern extends to emotional speech. In this study, speech recordings in five emotion contexts (angry, happy, interested, sad, and neutral) were obtained from 15 adult males with ASD and 15 controls (Experiment 1), and were later presented to 52 listeners (22 with ASD) who were asked to identify the emotion expressed and rate the level of naturalness of the emotion in each recording (Experiment 2). Compared to the TD group, talkers with ASD produced phrases with greater intensity, longer durations, and increased pitch range for all emotions except neutral, suggesting that their greater pitch variability was specific to emotional contexts. When asked to identify emotion from speech, both groups of listeners were more accurate at identifying the emotion context from speech produced by ASD speakers compared to TD speakers, but rated ASD emotional speech as sounding less natural. Collectively, these results reveal differences in emotional speech production in talkers with ASD that provide an acoustic basis for reported perceptions of oddness in the speech presentation of adults with ASD. Autism Res 2017, 10: 1991-2001. © 2017 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

LAY SUMMARY

This study examined emotional speech communication produced and perceived by adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically-developing (TD) controls. Compared to the TD group, talkers with ASD produced emotional phrases that were louder, longer, and more variable in pitch. Both ASD and TD listeners were more accurate at identifying emotion in speech produced by ASD speakers compared to TD speakers, but rated ASD emotional speech as sounding less natural.

Emotional prosody processing in autism spectrum disorder

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are characterized by severe deficits in social communication, whereby the nature of their impairments in emotional prosody processing have yet to be specified. Here, we investigated emotional prosody processing in individuals with ASD and controls with novel, lifelike behavioral and neuroimaging paradigms. Compared to controls, individuals with ASD showed reduced emotional prosody recognition accuracy on a behavioral task. On the neural level, individuals with ASD displayed reduced activity of the STS, insula and amygdala for complex vs basic emotions compared to controls. Moreover, the coupling between the STS and amygdala for complex vs basic emotions was reduced in the ASD group. Finally, groups differed with respect to the relationship between brain activity and behavioral performance. Brain activity during emotional prosody processing was more strongly related to prosody recognition accuracy in ASD participants. In contrast, the coupling between STS and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) activity predicted behavioral task performance more strongly in the control group. These results provide evidence for aberrant emotional prosody processing of individuals with ASD. They suggest that the differences in the relationship between the neural and behavioral level of individuals with ASD may account for their observed deficits in social communication.

Language and music phrase boundary processing in Autism Spectrum Disorder: An ERP study

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is frequently associated with communicative impairment, regardless of intelligence level or mental age. Impairment of prosodic processing in particular is a common feature of ASD. Despite extensive overlap in neural resources involved in prosody and music processing, music perception seems to be spared in this population. The present study is the first to investigate prosodic phrasing in ASD in both language and music, combining event-related brain potential (ERP) and behavioral methods. We tested phrase boundary processing in language and music in neuro-typical adults and high-functioning individuals with ASD. We targeted an ERP response associated with phrase boundary processing in both language and music - i.e., the Closure Positive Shift (CPS). While a language-CPS was observed in the neuro-typical group, for ASD participants a smaller response failed to reach statistical significance. In music, we found a boundary-onset music-CPS for both groups during pauses between musical phrases. Our results support the view of preserved processing of musical cues in ASD individuals, with a corresponding prosodic impairment. This suggests that, despite the existence of a domain-general processing mechanism (the CPS), key differences in the integration of features of language and music may lead to the prosodic impairment in ASD.

A Systematic Review of Speech Assessments for Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Recommendations for Best Practice

PURPOSE

The purpose of this systematic review was to provide a summary and evaluation of speech assessments used with children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). A subsequent narrative review was completed to ascertain the core components of an evidence-based pediatric speech assessment, which, together with the results of the systematic review, provide clinical and research guidelines for best practice.

METHOD

A systematic search of eight databases was used to find peer-reviewed research articles published between 1990 and 2014 assessing the speech of children with ASD. Eligible articles were categorized according to the assessment methods used and the speech characteristics described.

RESULTS

The review identified 21 articles that met the inclusion criteria, search criteria, and confidence in ASD diagnosis. The speech of prelinguistic participants was assessed in seven articles. Speech assessments with verbal participants were completed in 15 articles with segmental and suprasegmental aspects of speech analyzed. Assessment methods included connected speech samples, single-word naming tasks, speech imitation tasks, and analysis of the production of words and sentences.

CONCLUSIONS

Clinical and research guidelines for speech assessment of children with ASD are outlined. Future comparisons will be facilitated by the use of consistent reporting methods in research focusing on children with ASD.

Atypical preference for infant-directed speech as an early marker of autism spectrum disorders? A literature review and directions for further research

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) refer to a complex group of neurodevelopmental disorders causing difficulties with communication and interpersonal relationships, as well as restricted and repetitive behaviours and interests. As early identification, diagnosis, and intervention provide better long-term outcomes, early markers of ASD have gained increased research attention. This review examines evidence that auditory processing enhanced by social interest, in particular auditory preference of speech directed towards infants and young children (i.e. infant-directed speech - IDS), may be an early marker of risk for ASD. Although this review provides evidence for IDS preference as, indeed, a potential early marker of ASD, the explanation for differences in IDS processing among children with ASD versus other children remains unclear, as are the implications of these impairments for later social-communicative development. Therefore, it is crucial to explore atypicalities in IDS processing early on development and to understand whether preferential listening to specific types of speech sounds in the first years of life may help to predict the impairments in social and language development.

Detecting Abnormal Word Utterances in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders: Machine-Learning-Based Voice Analysis Versus Speech Therapists

Abnormal prosody is often evident in the voice intonations of individuals with autism spectrum disorders. We compared a machine-learning-based voice analysis with human hearing judgments made by 10 speech therapists for classifying children with autism spectrum disorders ( n = 30) and typical development ( n = 51). Using stimuli limited to single-word utterances, machine-learning-based voice analysis was superior to speech therapist judgments. There was a significantly higher true-positive than false-negative rate for machine-learning-based voice analysis but not for speech therapists. Results are discussed in terms of some artificiality of clinician judgments based on single-word utterances, and the objectivity machine-learning-based voice analysis adds to judging abnormal prosody.

Acoustic analysis of speech intonation pattern of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders

PURPOSE

This study aimed to analyze prosodic elements of speech segments of students with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and compare with the control group, using an acoustic analysis.

METHODS

Speech recordings were performed with a sample of individuals with ASD (n = 19) and with typical development (n = 19) of the male gender, age range: 8-33 years. The prosody questionnaire ALIB (Brazilian Linguistic Atlas) was used as script, which contains interrogative, affirmative and imperative sentences. Data were analyzed using the PRAAT software and forwarded to statistical analysis in order to verify possible significant differences between the two groups studied in each prosodic parameter evaluated (fundamental frequency, intensity and duration) and its respective variables.

RESULTS

There were significant differences for the variables tessitura, melodic amplitude of tonic vowel, melodic amplitude of pretonic vowel, maximum intensity, minimum intensity, tonic vowel duration, pretonic vowel duration and phrase duration.

CONCLUSION

Individuals with ASD present significant differences in prosody compared to those with typical development. It is noteworthy, however, the necessity of additional studies on the characterization of prosodic aspects of speech of individuals with ASD with a larger sample and a more restricted age group.

The singular nature of auditory and visual scene analysis in autism

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder often have difficulty acquiring relevant auditory and visual information in daily environments, despite not being diagnosed as hearing impaired or having low vision. Resent psychophysical and neurophysiological studies have shown that autistic individuals have highly specific individual differences at various levels of information processing, including feature extraction, automatic grouping and top-down modulation in auditory and visual scene analysis. Comparison of the characteristics of scene analysis between auditory and visual modalities reveals some essential commonalities, which could provide clues about the underlying neural mechanisms. Further progress in this line of research may suggest effective methods for diagnosing and supporting autistic individuals.This article is part of the themed issue 'Auditory and visual scene analysis'.

Basic and complex emotion recognition in children with autism: cross-cultural findings

BACKGROUND

Children with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) have emotion recognition deficits when tested in different expression modalities (face, voice, body). However, these findings usually focus on basic emotions, using one or two expression modalities. In addition, cultural similarities and differences in emotion recognition patterns in children with ASC have not been explored before. The current study examined the similarities and differences in the recognition of basic and complex emotions by children with ASC and typically developing (TD) controls across three cultures: Israel, Britain, and Sweden.

METHODS

Fifty-five children with high-functioning ASC, aged 5-9, were compared to 58 TD children. On each site, groups were matched on age, sex, and IQ. Children were tested using four tasks, examining recognition of basic and complex emotions from voice recordings, videos of facial and bodily expressions, and emotional video scenarios including all modalities in context.

RESULTS

Compared to their TD peers, children with ASC showed emotion recognition deficits in both basic and complex emotions on all three modalities and their integration in context. Complex emotions were harder to recognize, compared to basic emotions for the entire sample. Cross-cultural agreement was found for all major findings, with minor deviations on the face and body tasks.

CONCLUSIONS

Our findings highlight the multimodal nature of ER deficits in ASC, which exist for basic as well as complex emotions and are relatively stable cross-culturally. Cross-cultural research has the potential to reveal both autism-specific universal deficits and the role that specific cultures play in the way empathy operates in different countries.

Predicting symptom severity in autism spectrum disorder based on cortical thickness measures in agglomerative data

Machine learning approaches have been widely used for the identification of neuropathology from neuroimaging data. However, these approaches require large samples and suffer from the challenges associated with multi-site, multi-protocol data. We propose a novel approach to address these challenges, and demonstrate its usefulness with the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE) database. We predict symptom severity based on cortical thickness measurements from 156 individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) from four different sites. The proposed approach consists of two main stages: a domain adaptation stage using partial least squares regression to maximize the consistency of imaging data across sites; and a learning stage combining support vector regression for regional prediction of severity with elastic-net penalized linear regression for integrating regional predictions into a whole-brain severity prediction. The proposed method performed markedly better than simpler alternatives, better with multi-site than single-site data, and resulted in a considerably higher cross-validated correlation score than has previously been reported in the literature for multi-site data. This demonstration of the utility of the proposed approach for detecting structural brain abnormalities in ASD from the multi-site, multi-protocol ABIDE dataset indicates the potential of designing machine learning methods to meet the challenges of agglomerative data.

Uh and um in children with autism spectrum disorders or language impairment

Atypical pragmatic language is often present in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), along with delays or deficits in structural language. This study investigated the use of the "fillers" uh and um by children ages 4-8 during the autism diagnostic observation schedule. Fillers reflect speakers' difficulties with planning and delivering speech, but they also serve communicative purposes, such as negotiating control of the floor or conveying uncertainty. We hypothesized that children with ASD would use different patterns of fillers compared to peers with typical development or with specific language impairment (SLI), reflecting differences in social ability and communicative intent. Regression analyses revealed that children in the ASD group were much less likely to use um than children in the other two groups. Filler use is an easy-to-quantify feature of behavior that, in concert with other observations, may help to distinguish ASD from SLI. Autism Res 2016, 9: 854-865. © 2016 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Event-Related Potentials and Emotion Processing in Child Psychopathology

In recent years there has been increasing interest in the neural mechanisms underlying altered emotional processes in children and adolescents with psychopathology. This review provides a brief overview of the most up-to-date findings in the field of event-related potentials (ERPs) to facial and vocal emotional expressions in the most common child psychopathological conditions. In regards to externalizing behavior (i.e., ADHD, CD), ERP studies show enhanced early components to anger, reflecting enhanced sensory processing, followed by reductions in later components to anger, reflecting reduced cognitive-evaluative processing. In regards to internalizing behavior, research supports models of increased processing of threat stimuli especially at later more elaborate and effortful stages. Finally, in autism spectrum disorders abnormalities have been observed at early visual-perceptual stages of processing. An affective neuroscience framework for understanding child psychopathology can be valuable in elucidating underlying mechanisms and inform preventive intervention.

Relations Among Detection of Syllable Stress, Speech Abnormalities, and Communicative Ability in Adults With Autism Spectrum Disorders

PURPOSE

To date, the literature on perception of affective, pragmatic, and grammatical prosody abilities in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has been sparse and contradictory. It is interesting to note that the primary perception of syllable stress within the word structure, which is crucial for all prosody functions, remains relatively unexplored in ASD. Thus, in the current study, we explored syllable stress perception sensitivity and its relationship to speech production abnormalities and communicative ability in adults with ASD.

METHOD

A same-different syllable stress perception task using pairs of identical 4-syllable words was delivered to 42 adults with/without high-functioning ASD, matched for age, to investigate primary speech perception ability in ASD. Speech production and communicative ability in ASD was measured using the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (Lord et al., 2000).

RESULTS

As predicted, the results showed that adults with ASD were less sensitive in making judgments about syllable stress relative to controls. Also, partial correlations revealed a key association of speech production abnormalities with stress perception sensitivity, rather than communicative ability.

CONCLUSIONS

Our findings provide empirical evidence for deficits on primary syllable stress perception in ASD and its role on sociocommunicative difficulties. This information could facilitate the development of effective interventions for speech and language therapy and social communication.

[Slowing down the flow of facial information enhances facial scanning in children with autism spectrum disorders: A pilot eye tracking study]

OBJECTIVE

Face and gaze avoidance are among the most characteristic and salient symptoms of autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Studies using eye tracking highlighted early and lifelong ASD-specific abnormalities in attention to face such as decreased attention to internal facial features. These specificities could be partly explained by disorders in the perception and integration of rapid and complex information such as that conveyed by facial movements and more broadly by biological and physical environment. Therefore, we wish to test whether slowing down facial dynamics may improve the way children with ASD attend to a face.

METHODS

We used an eye tracking method to examine gaze patterns of children with ASD aged 3 to 8 (n=23) and TD controls (n=29) while viewing the face of a speaker telling a story. The story was divided into 6 sequences that were randomly displayed at 3 different speeds, i.e. a real-time speed (RT), a slow speed (S70=70% of RT speed), a very slow speed (S50=50% of RT speed). S70 and S50 were displayed thanks to software called Logiral™, aimed at slowing down visual and auditory stimuli simultaneously and without tone distortion. The visual scene was divided into four regions of interest (ROI): eyes region; mouth region; whole face region; outside the face region. The total time, number and mean duration of visual fixations on the whole visual scene and the four ROI were measured between and within the two groups.

RESULTS

Compared to TD children, children with ASD spent significantly less time attending to the visual scenes and, when they looked at the scene, they spent less time scanning the speaker's face in general and her mouth in particular, and more time looking outside facial area. Within the ASD group mean duration of fixation increased on the whole scene and particularly on the mouth area, in R50 compared to RT. Children with mild autism spent more time looking at the face than the two other groups of ASD children, and spent more time attending to the face and mouth as well as longer mean duration of visual fixation on mouth and eyes, at slow speeds (S50 and/or S70) than at RT one.

CONCLUSIONS

Slowing down facial dynamics enhances looking time on face, and particularly on mouth and/or eyes, in a group of 23 children with ASD and particularly in a small subgroup with mild autism. Given the crucial role of reading the eyes for emotional processing and that of lip-reading for language processing, our present result and other converging ones could pave the way for novel socio-emotional and verbal rehabilitation methods for autistic population. Further studies should investigate whether increased attention to face and particularly eyes and mouth is correlated to emotional/social and/or verbal/language improvements.

Perception of Melodic Contour and Intonation in Autism Spectrum Disorder: Evidence From Mandarin Speakers

Tone language experience benefits pitch processing in music and speech for typically developing individuals. No known studies have examined pitch processing in individuals with autism who speak a tone language. This study investigated discrimination and identification of melodic contour and speech intonation in a group of Mandarin-speaking individuals with high-functioning autism. Individuals with autism showed superior melodic contour identification but comparable contour discrimination relative to controls. In contrast, these individuals performed worse than controls on both discrimination and identification of speech intonation. These findings provide the first evidence for differential pitch processing in music and speech in tone language speakers with autism, suggesting that tone language experience may not compensate for speech intonation perception deficits in individuals with autism.

Cortical processing of phonetic and emotional information in speech: A cross-modal priming study

The current study employed behavioral and electrophysiological measures to investigate the timing, localization, and neural oscillation characteristics of cortical activities associated with phonetic and emotional information processing of speech. The experimental design used a cross-modal priming paradigm in which the normal adult participants were presented a visual prime followed by an auditory target. Primes were facial expressions that systematically varied in emotional content (happy or angry) and mouth shape (corresponding to /a/ or /i/ vowels). Targets were spoken words that varied by emotional prosody (happy or angry) and vowel (/a/ or /i/). In both the phonetic and prosodic conditions, participants were asked to judge congruency status of the visual prime and the auditory target. Behavioral results showed a congruency effect for both percent correct and reaction time. Two ERP responses, the N400 and late positive response (LPR), were identified in both conditions. Source localization and inter-trial phase coherence of the N400 and LPR components further revealed different cortical contributions and neural oscillation patterns for selective processing of phonetic and emotional information in speech. The results provide corroborating evidence for the necessity of differentiating brain mechanisms underlying the representation and processing of co-existing linguistic and paralinguistic information in spoken language, which has important implications for theoretical models of speech recognition as well as clinical studies on the neural bases of language and social communication deficits.

Prosodic skills in children with Down syndrome and in typically developing children

BACKGROUND

Many studies have analysed language development in children with Down syndrome to understand better the nature of their linguistic delays and the reason why these delays, particularly those in the morphosyntactic area, seem greater than their cognitive impairment. However, the prosodic characteristics of language development in children with Down syndrome have been scarcely investigated.

AIMS

To analyse the prosodic skills of children with Down syndrome in the production of multi-word utterances. Data on the prosodic skills of these children were compared with data on typically developing children matched on developmental age and vocabulary size. Between-group differences and the relationships between prosodic and syntactic skills were investigated.

METHODS & PROCEDURES

The participants were nine children with Down syndrome (who ranged in chronological age from 45 to 63 months and had a mean developmental age of 30 months) and 12 30-month-old typically developing children. The children in both groups had a vocabulary size of approximately 450 words. The children's spontaneous productions were recorded during observations of mother-child play sessions.

OUTCOMES & RESULTS

Data analyses showed that despite their morphosyntactic difficulties, children with Down syndrome were able to master some aspects of prosody in multi-word utterances. They were able to produce single intonation multi-word utterances on the same level as typically developing children. In addition, the intonation contour of their utterances was not negatively influenced by syntactic complexity, contrary to what occurred in typically developing children, although it has to be considered that the utterances produced by children with Down syndrome were less complex than those produced by children in the control group. However, children with Down syndrome appeared to be less able than typically developing children to use intonation to express the pragmatic interrogative function.

CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS

The findings are discussed considering the effects of social experience on the utterance prosodic realization.

Vocal patterns in infants with autism spectrum disorder: canonical babbling status and vocalization frequency

Canonical babbling is a critical milestone for speech development and is usually well in place by 10 months. The possibility that infants with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show late onset of canonical babbling has so far eluded evaluation. Rate of vocalization or "volubility" has also been suggested as possibly aberrant in infants with ASD. We conducted a retrospective video study examining vocalizations of 37 infants at 9-12 and 15-18 months. Twenty-three of the 37 infants were later diagnosed with ASD and indeed produced low rates of canonical babbling and low volubility by comparison with the 14 typically developing infants. The study thus supports suggestions that very early vocal patterns may prove to be a useful component of early screening and diagnosis of ASD.

Evidence for shared deficits in identifying emotions from faces and from voices in autism spectrum disorders and specific language impairment

BACKGROUND

While autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and specific language impairment (SLI) have traditionally been conceptualized as distinct disorders, recent findings indicate that the boundaries between these two conditions are not clear-cut. While considerable research has investigated overlap in the linguistic characteristics of ASD and SLI, relatively less research has explored possible overlap in the socio-cognitive domain, particularly in terms of the emotion recognition abilities of these two groups of children.

AIMS

To investigate facial and vocal emotion recognition in children with ASD, children with SLI and typically developing (TD) children. To do so, the ASD group was subdivided into those with 'normal' (ALN) and those with 'impaired' (ALI) language to explore the extent to which language ability influenced performance on the emotion recognition task.

METHODS & PROCEDURES

Twenty-nine children with ASD (17 ALN and 12 ALI), 18 children with SLI and 66 TD children completed visual and auditory versions of an emotion recognition task. For the visual version of the task, the participants saw photographs of people expressing one of six emotions (happy, sad, scared, angry, surprised, disgusted) on the whole face. For the auditory modality, the participants heard a neutral sentence that conveyed one of the six emotional expressions in the tone of the voice. In both conditions, the children were required to indicate how the person they could see/hear was feeling by selecting a cartoon face that was presented on the computer screen.

OUTCOMES & RESULTS

The results showed that all clinical groups were less accurate than the TD children when identifying emotions on the face and in the voice. While the ALN children were less accurate than the TD children only when identifying expressions that require inferring another's mental state (surprise, disgust) emotional expressions, the ALI and the SLI children were less accurate than the TD children when identifying the basic (happy, sad, scared, angry) as well as the inferred emotions.

CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS

The results indicate that children with ALI and children with SLI share emotion recognition deficits, which are likely to be driven by the poor language abilities of these two groups.

Unraveling the nature of autism: finding order amid change

In this article, we hypothesize that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are born with a deficit in invariance detection, which is a learning process whereby people and animals come to attend the relatively stable patterns or structural regularities in the changing stimulus array. This paper synthesizes a substantial body of research which suggests that a deficit in the domain-general perceptual learning process of invariant detection in ASD can lead to a cascade of consequences in different developmental domains. We will outline how this deficit in invariant detection can cause uncertainty, unpredictability, and a lack of control for individuals with ASD and how varying degrees of impairments in this learning process can account for the heterogeneity of the ASD phenotype. We also describe how differences in neural plasticity in ASD underlie the impairments in perceptual learning. The present account offers an alternative to prior theories and contributes to the challenge of understanding the developmental trajectories that result in the variety of autistic behaviors.

Emotional prosody perception and its association with pragmatic language in school-aged children with high-function autism

Emotional prosody perception is essential for social communication, but it is still an open issue whether children with high-function autism (HFA) exhibit any prosodic perception deficits or experience selective impairments in recognizing the prosody of positive emotions. Moreover, the associations between prosody perception, pragmatic language, and social adaptation in children with HFA have not been fully explored. This study investigated whether emotional prosody perception for words and sentences in children with HFA (n=25, 6-11 years of age) differed from age-matched, typically developing children (TD, n=25) when presented with an emotional prosody identification task. The Children's Communication Checklist and Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale were used to assess pragmatic and social adaption abilities. Results show that children with HFA performed poorer than TD children in identifying happy prosody in both emotionally neutral and relevant utterances. In contrast, children with HFA did not exhibit any deficits in identifying sad and angry prosody. Results of correlation analyses revealed a positive association between happy prosody identification and pragmatic function. The findings indicate that school-aged children with HFA experience difficulties in recognizing happy prosody, and that this limitation in prosody perception is associated with their pragmatic and social adaption performances.

Judging emotions in lexical-prosodic congruent and incongruent speech stimuli by adolescents in the autism spectrum

OBJECTIVE

The purpose of the present study was to assess how adolescents with autism who vary in the severity of autistic characteristics judge the emotional state of the speaker when lexical and prosodic information is congruent or incongruent.

PARTICIPANTS

Eighty participants, 24 autistic and 56 typically developing (TD) subjects participated: (a) 11 autistic adolescents between 9.5 and 16.83 years old, studying at general education settings (AA1), (b) 13 autistic adolescents between 15.91 and 20.33 years old, studying at a special school (AA2), and (c) 56 TD subjects between 6 and 29 years old. Listeners were required to judge the emotional meaning of words (sad/happy) in congruent conditions and incongruent conditions.

RESULTS

(a) All participants judged lexical and prosodic meaning separately with high accuracy, (b) all participants showed prolonged reaction times in the incongruent compared to the congruent condition, (c) AA1 relied on prosodic information in the incongruent condition similarly to TD 9-15 year olds and TD adults, (d) AA2 and TD 6-8 year olds did not rely on prosodic information in the incongruent condition, and (e) both education placements, the severity of autistic characteristics and nonverbal IQ contributed to prosodic judgment in the incongruent condition in autistic adolescents.

CONCLUSIONS

The two groups of autistic adolescents processed both lexical and prosodic information in the incongruent condition. However, the severity of autistic characteristics influenced the preference for prosody.