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

Abstract

2 AbstractPurpose: To date the literature on perception of affective, pragmatic and grammatical prosody abilities in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has been sparse and contradictory. Interestingly, the primary perception of syllable stress within the word structure, which is crucial for all prosody functions, remains relatively unexplored in ASD. Thus, the current study explored syllable stress perception sensitivity and its relation to speech production abnormalities and communicative ability in adults with ASD.Method: A same-different syllable stress perception task using pairs of identical foursyllable 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.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 per se.Conclusions: Our findings provide empirical evidence for deficits on primary syllable stress perception in ASD and its role on socio-communicative difficulties. This information could facilitate the development of effective interventions for speech and language therapy and social communication.

Lexical stress contrastivity in Italian children with autism spectrum disorders: an exploratory acoustic study

“…Lexical stress is just one type of expressive prosody. With regard to the production of lexical stress, specifically, some previous studies have reported atypical production in ASD (Kargas, López, Morris, & Reddy, 2016;McAlpine, Plexico, Plumb, & Cleary, 2014;Paul, Augustyn, Klin, & Volkmar, 2005) while others have not (Shriberg et al, 2001).…”

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

“…Moreover, there have been reports that atypical prosody may persist even after other aspects of speech and language have begun to improve (e.g., DeMyer, Barton, DeMyer, Norton, Allen, & Steele, 1973;Simmons & Baltaxe, 1975). With regard to speech production, in particular, some previous research has found evidence of atypical production of lexical stress in individuals with ASD (Kargas, López, Morris, & Reddy, 2016;McAlpine, Plexico, Plumb, & Cleary, 2014;Paul, Augustyn, Klin, & Volkmar, 2005), while other research has not (Shriberg et al, 2001). None of these studies of lexical stress included acoustic analyses.…”

The Multidimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP)

“…For example, some individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) produce speech which lacks the usual acoustic characteristics which mark particular prosodic features; for example, the difference in duration between stressed and unstressed syllables tends to be smaller in the speech of children with ASD (Paul, Bianchi, Augustyn, Klin, & Volkmar, 2008). These prosodic production deficits extend to perception as well: individuals with ASD tend to have difficulty with the perception of prosodic cues to emotion (Globerson, Amir, Kishon-Rabin, & Golan, 2015;Golan, Baron-Cohen, Hill, & Rutherford, 2007;Kleinman, Marciano, & Ault, 2001;Phillip et al, 2010;Rutherford, Baron-Cohen, & Wheelwright, 2002), lexical stress (Kargas, López, Morris, & Reddy, 2016), phrase boundaries (Diehl, Bennetto, Watson, Gunlogson, & McDonough, 2008), and linguistic focus (Peppé, Cleland, Gibbon, O'Hare, & Castilla, 2011) in speech (but see Diehl, Friedberg, Paul, & Snedeker, 2015). These prosody perception difficulties can interfere not only with communication skill and sociability (Paul, Augustyn, Klin, & Volkmar, 2005), but may also increase the risk of delayed language acquisition given the importance of prosody for disambiguating language meaning (Lyons, Simmons, & Streeter, 2014).…”