Funding gratefully received from the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Executive.
Prosodic Ability in Children with Autism.
The Speech Science
Research Centre (Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh) was awarded
funding of £135,500 from the CSO
for a 2-year project entitled "Prosodic Ability in Children with Autism".
The project started in April 2002 and the grant holders are Dr
Fiona Gibbon and Dr Susan Peppé
from QMUC, and Dr Anne O'Hare and Marion Rutherford from Edinburgh's Royal
Hospital for Sick Children.
Summary
Impaired communication occurs in all individuals with
autism - it is a defining feature of the condition. One aspect of their language,
which has been investigated very little to date is their understanding and
expression of prosody and intonation: not what is said but the way it is said.
This research used a procedure, PEPS-C, to measure
receptive and expressive prosodic skills in 30 children with high-functioning
autism (normal non-verbal ability) aged 7-13 years and 70 controls matched
for verbal mental age.
The project examined how the children with autism use and understand prosody
and intonation as they affect turn taking in conversation, the expression
of emotion and emphasis, and the division of speech into intelligible chunks.
Other aspects of their language and nonverbal ability
were also assessed. Results were compared with that of typically developing
children.
Findings
The children with autism perfomed significantly poorer
than the typically developing children, even after adjusting for language
ability. There was great variety in the performance of the children with autism,
but all of them had difficulty with at least one aspect of prosody.
At subtest level, Affect Input, Intonation Output, Focus Output, Prosody Input and Prosody Output scores were the main areas of difficulty for the children with autism. This meas that the children with autism had significant difficulty using & understanding affect (emotions) when expressed by prosody alone; using contrastive stress to emphasise words; hearing difference in prosody and in imitating prosody.
Prosody was highly related to language skills, meaning that children with better language skills generally have better prosodic skills. In addition, the majority of the children with autism had difficulties in most aspects of language.
New Page: Click here for our new results page
Click here for information about the effects of disordered prosody on communication.
Useful Links for More Information on
Autism:
The National Autistic Society
Autism Connect
The Autism Society of America
[home] [PEPS-C] [autism] [asperger's] [theory of mind] [publications] [contact]
Funding gratefully received from the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Executive.
PROSODY AND AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDERS