Prosodic Development in Middle Childhood and Adolescence in High‐Functioning Autism

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate the perception and production of several domains of prosodic performance in a cross-sectional sample of preadolescents and adolescents with and without high-functioning autism (HFA). To look at the role of language abilities on prosodic performance, the HFA groups were subdivided based on "high" and "low" language performance on the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-Fourth Edition (CELF-4) (Semel, Wiig, & Secord). Social and cognitive abilities were also examined to determine their relationship to prosodic performance. No significant differences were seen in prosody scores in the younger versus older subgroups in typically developing (TD) group with age-appropriate language. There was small but significant improvement in performance with age in the groups with HFA. Comparing performance at each age level across diagnostic groups showed that preteens with HFA and higher language levels perform similarly to their TD peers on all prosodic tasks, whereas those with lower language skills scored significantly worse than both their higher language and TD peers when looking at composite perception and production findings. Teens with HFA showed no deficits on perception tasks; however, those with low language levels had difficulty on several production tasks when compared to the TD group. Regression analyses suggested that, for the preteen group with HFA, language was the strongest predictor of prosodic perception, whereas nonverbal IQ was most highly predictive of prosodic production. For adolescents with HFA, social skills significantly contributed to the prediction of prosodic perception and, along with language abilities, predicted prosodic production. Implications of these findings will be discussed.

Assessing Pragmatic Language in Autism Spectrum Disorder: The Yale in vivo Pragmatic Protocol

“…There is a trend for the adolescents with TD to show both decreases in errors and increases in response to cues on this protocol, which is not seen in the group with ASD, although these trends are somewhat item specific. Interestingly, this trend parallels our recent report on the development of prosody in this population (Lyons, Simmons, & Paul, 2014), in which we found the same pattern (i.e., significant differences between ASD and TD participants were seen more broadly in adolescent than in preadolescents, as the typically developing group advanced in their mastery of prosody, and the group with ASD remained relatively stagnant in both these areas). The link between pragmatic and prosodic development in this study is most evident in the finding that the ASD group was minimally able to repair most conversational breakdowns based on verbal content, but had significantly more difficulty repairing breakdowns based on paralinguistic signals, a finding that replicates one in an earlier study using a natural conversational sample (Paul, Orlovski, Marcinko, & Volkmar, 2009).…”

Perception and Production of Statement-Question Intonation in Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Developmental Investigation

“…These findings are consistent with the majority of the literature that suggests intact statement-question identification in ASD (Chevallier et al, 2009;Filipe et al, 2014;Järvinen-Pasley et al, 2008a;Paul et al, 2005). However, they contradict the findings indicating impaired discrimination (McCann et al, 2007;Peppé et al, 2007), impaired identification among "languageimpaired" preadolescents (Lyons et al, 2014), and impaired discrimination and identification among Mandarin speakers (Jiang et al, 2015). Notably, as previously mentioned, the impaired discrimination suggested by McCann et al (2007) and Peppé et al (2007) was evaluated using the short-item discrimination task within PEPS-C, which contains the laryngographic sounds of the statement-question pairs, as well as those of the liking-disliking pairs from the affect subtask.…”

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

“…For individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), pervasive social disability manifests not only in difficulties in social perception and cognition [Sasson, Pinkham, Carpenter, & Belger, 2011], but also in differences in social expressivity [Begeer, Koot, Rieffe, Terwogt, & Stegge, 2008]. Individuals with ASD are characterized by distinct social presentations, including atypical facial affect [Faso, Sasson, & Pinkham, 2015] and distinct affective speech patterns [Fosnot & Jun, 1999;Nadig & Shaw, 2012] that begin in childhood and are associated with overall language ability [Lyons, Simmons, & Paul, 2014]. Consequently, the social presentation of individuals with ASD is reliably rated as more odd or awkward by potential social partners [Van Bourgondien & Woods, 1992;Paul, Augustyn, Klin, & Volkmar, 2005;Sasson et al, 2017].…”