The Relationship between Form and Function Level Receptive Prosodic Abilities in Autism

Abstract

Prosody can be conceived as having form (auditory-perceptual characteristics) and function (pragmatic/linguistic meaning). No known studies have examined the relationship between form-and functionlevel prosodic skills in relation to the effects of stimulus length and/or complexity upon such abilities in autism. Research in this area is both insubstantial and inconclusive. Children with autism and controls completed the receptive tasks of the Profiling Elements of Prosodic Systems in Children (PEPS-C) test, which examines both form-and function-level skills, and a sentence-level task assessing the understanding of intonation. While children with autism were unimpaired in both form and function tasks at the single-word level, they showed significantly poorer performance in the corresponding sentence-level tasks than controls. Implications for future research are discussed.

Intact Spectral but Abnormal Temporal Processing of Auditory Stimuli in Autism

“…Using a complex low-level auditory task, Alcantara also found diminished temporal but intact spectral processing in children with autism (Alcantara et al 2004). Järvinen-Pasley and colleagues (Jarvinen-Pasley et al 2008a) found, using the PEPS-C task (a computerised task that tests both prosody form perception and prosody function perception), that children with autism performed poorer on affective intonation, chunking (phrasing) and long-sound discrimination. Especially the chunking (in which a short silence between words is informative for sentence meaning) and long-sound discrimination (short-sound discrimation was unaffected) suggest that temporal processing was reduced in the autism group as well.…”

Commentary on "Why Does Music Therapy Help in Autism?" by N. Khetrapal

“…Also, their ability to perceive pitch in speech may be heightened, but their ability to connect pitch with speech meaning seems to be impaired (e.g. in Järvinen-Pasley, Peppé, et al, 2008, who showed that children were unable to distinguish between interrogative phrases and statements, based on whether the pitch went up or down at the end of the phrase). Thus, the task before a music therapist may be to teach a patient to connect pitch and rhythm cues with meanings.…”

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

“…Specifically, some research groups reported that individuals with ASD exhibited deficits in the comprehension of grammatical cues of word stress (Paul, Augustyn, Klin, & Volkmar, 2005a;Peppé et al, 2007), whereas others have not (Chevallier, Noveck, Happé, & Wilson, 2009;Crossman et al, 2010;Järvinen-Pasley, Peppé, King-Smith, & Heaton, 2008a). A similar pattern of inconsistencies in the results is evident in studies exploring the ability to use stress to perceive phrase structures in individuals with ASD.…”