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http://dx.doi.org/10.13064/KSSS.2020.12.2.039

A study of the prosodic patterns of autism and normal children in the imitating declarative and interrogative sentences  

Lee, Jinhyung (Speech-Language Pathology, Chungnam National University)
Seong, Cheoljae (Linguistics, Chungnam National University)
Publication Information
Phonetics and Speech Sciences / v.12, no.2, 2020 , pp. 39-49 More about this Journal
Abstract
The prosody of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has several abnormal features, including monotonous speech. The purpose of this study was to compare acoustic features between an ASD group and a typically developing (TD) group and within the ASD group. The study also examined audience perceptions of the lengthening effect of increasing the number of syllables. 50 participants were divided into two groups (20 with ASD and 30 TD), and they were asked to imitate a total of 28 sentences. In the auditory-perceptual evaluation, seven participants chose sentence types in 115 sentences. Pitch, intensity, speech rate, and pitch slope were used to analyze the significant differences. In conclusion, the ASD group showed higher pitch and intensity and a lower overall speaking rate than the TD group. Moreover, there were significant differences in s2 slope of interrogative sentences. Finally, based on the auditory-perceptual evaluation, only 4.3% of interrogative sentences produced by participants with ASD were perceived as declarative sentences. The cause of this abnormal prosody has not been clearly identified; however, pragmatic ability and other characteristics of autism are related to ASD prosody. This study identified prosodic ASD patterns and suggested the need to develop treatments to improve prosody.
Keywords
autism; prosody; acoustic analysis; declarative; interrogative;
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