Expressive prosody in children with autism spectrum conditions
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Accepted Version
Date
2011-01
Authors
Peppé, Sue J. E.
Cleland, Joanne
Gibbon, Fiona E.
O'Hare, Anne
Martinez-Castilla, Pastora
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Elsevier
Published Version
Abstract
The expressive prosodic abilities of two groups of school-age children with autism spectrum conditions (ASC), Asperger's syndrome (AS) and high-functioning autism (HFA), were compared with those of typically-developing controls. The HFA group showed impairment relative to age-matched controls on all the prosody tasks assessed (affect, sentence-type, contrastive stress, phrasing and imitation) while the AS showed impairment only on phrasing and imitation. Compared with lexically-matched controls, impairment on several tasks (affect, contrastive stress and imitation) was found in the HFA group but little in the AS group (phrasing and imitation). Comparisons between the ASC groups showed significant differences on prosody skills. Impairment in prosodic skills may therefore be a reliable indicator of autism spectrum subgroups, at least as far as communicative functioning is concerned. There were also significant differences between ASC groups and lexically-matched typically-developing children on expressive language skills, but the incomplete correlation of the prosody results with scores on language tasks suggests that the prosodic differences between the two groups may not all be attributable to the level of language skills. Suggested further research is to investigate the relationship of prosody and language skills in this population more closely, and to develop a prosody test as part of the diagnostic criteria of ASC.
Description
Keywords
Autism spectrum disorders , Prosody , Intonation , Language , High-functioning autism , Asperger-syndrome , Language impairment , Intonation
Citation
PEPPÉ, S., CLELAND, J., GIBBON, F., O’HARE, A. & CASTILLA, P. M. 2011. Expressive prosody in children with autism spectrum conditions. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 24, 41-53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2010.07.005
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Copyright
Copyright © 2010, Elsevier. NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Journal of Neurolinguistics. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Journal of Neurolinguistics, [24, January 2011] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2010.07.005