The use of prosody during syntactic processing in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders

Abstract

In this study, we employed an eye-gaze paradigm to explore whether children (8-12) and adolescents (12-18) with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are able to use prosodic cues to determine the syntactic structure of an utterance. Persons with ASD were compared to typicallydeveloping (TD) peers matched on age, IQ, gender, and receptive language abilities. The stimuli were syntactically ambiguous but had a prosodic break that indicated the appropriate interpretation (feel the frog…with the feather vs. feel…the frog with the feather). We found that all groups were equally sensitive to the initial prosodic cues that were presented. Children and teens with ASD used prosody to interpret the ambiguous phrase as rapidly and efficiently as their TD peers. However, when a different cue was presented in subsequent trials, the younger ASD group was more likely to respond in a manner consistent with the initial prosodic cue rather than the new one. Eye-tracking data indicated that both younger groups (ASD and TD) had trouble shifting their interpretation as the prosodic cue changed, but the younger TD group was able to overcome this interference and produce an action consistent with the prosodic cue.KEYWORDS: Autism, prosody, intonation, syntax, communication The Use of Prosody During Syntactic Processing in Children With Autism Spectrum DisordersAutism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are neurodevelopmental disorders characterized by deficits in social interaction and communication, along with a propensity to engage in repetitive behaviors or have restricted interests (APA, 2000). The severity of these deficits and the ways in which they are expressed vary considerably. Until recently, most children diagnosed with ASD had severe language impairments or delays, and researchers estimated that as many as half were non-verbal (Lord & Paul, 1997). However, more recent estimates suggest that 80-86% of children with ASDs have some functional language (Lord, Risi, & Pickles, 2004). In fact, a substantial proportion of the school-aged children with ASD do not appear to have deficits in vocabulary, articulation or syntax (Joseph, Tager-Flusberg & Lord, 2002; Kjelgaard & TagerFlusberg, 2001. We will be referring to children with this profile as highly verbal.There are, however, two domains of language that appear to be impaired even in highlyverbal children with ASD. First, persons with ASD have impairments in pragmatics (Kelley, Paul, Fein & Naigles, 2006;Tager-Flusberg, Paul, & Lord, 2005;Young, Diehl, Morris, Hyman, & Bennetto, 2005), that seem related to their deficits in social interaction. Pragmatics represents the skills that allow us to use language as a social tool by going beyond the literal meaning of an utterance to understand the role that it plays in a particular interaction. Highly-verbal persons with ASD often perform well on highly structured measures of pragmatic ability (Young et al., 2005). Nonetheless, children with this profile have been found to have deficits in: interpreting the conversational intentions (and som...

‘Form is easy, meaning is hard’ revisited: (re) characterizing the strengths and weaknesses of language in children with autism spectrum disorder

“…Using a similar paradigm. Diehl et al found that teenagers with ASD were able to efficiently use prosodic cues to constrain their interpretation of sentences like ‘Put the apple on the towel in the box.’ High‐functioning children with ASD also understand the structural restrictions of reflexive pronouns in English (i.e., appropriately distinguishing Bart washed him from Bart washed himself ) and French (i.e., appropriately producing Elle se lave when shown pictures of a girl washing herself, and Elle le lave when shown pictures of the girl washing another). Finally (and allowing us to circle back to the original ‘form is easy’ studies), statistical learning of both artificial grammars and novel speech streams have been assessed in school‐aged children with ASD, and have yielded similarly positive effects as their TD controls (see Ref for a recent meta‐analysis of statistical learning in ASD).…”

“…Using a similar paradigm. Diehl et al 80 found that teenagers with ASD were able to efficiently use prosodic cues to constrain their interpretation of sentences like 'Put the apple on the towel in the box.' High-functioning children with ASD also understand the structural restrictions of reflexive pronouns in English (i.e., appropriately distinguishing Bart washed him from Bart washed himself 81 ) and French (i.e., appropriately producing Elle se lave when shown pictures of a girl washing herself, and Elle le lave when shown pictures of the girl washing another 82 ).…”

Effects of robots’ intonation and bodily appearance on robot-mediated communicative treatment outcomes for children with autism spectrum disorder

“…Children with ASD have been reported to produce atypical intonation, which has been variably described as sounding Brobotic,^Bmonotone,^Boverprecise,^or Bsing-song^( [18] and references therein), and have difficulties with using intonation appropriately in communication [40]. However, children with ASD may show strong pitch discrimination capacities in both speech and non-speech material [43] and can make use of intonational information to process syntactically ambiguous sentences [19]. These findings suggest that children with ASD and normal (verbal) intelligence can perceive the acoustic differences between monotonous speech and speech with normal intonation and may associate human speakers with speech with normal intonation.…”

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).…”