Differences in prosody behavior between individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and their typically developing peers have been considered a central feature of ASD since the earliest clinical descriptions of the disorder (e.g., Kanner, 1943/1973). Prosody includes pitch and volume among other dimensions of vocal-verbal behavior that…

Prosody or "melody in speech" in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is often perceived as atypical. This study examined perception and production of statements and questions in 84 children, adolescents and adults with and without ASD, as well as participants' pitch direction discrimination thresholds. The results suggested that the abilities…

Affective prosody recognition is an important area of research in autism spectrum conditions where difficulties in social cognition have been frequently observed. To probe into the mixed results reported in the literature, we conducted a systematic review with meta-analysis and examined potential factors that could explain the inconsistent…

The conclusions on prosodic pitch features in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have primarily been derived from studies in non-tonal language speakers. This cross-linguistic study evaluated the performance of imitating Cantonese lexical tones and their non-linguistic (nonspeech) counterparts by Cantonese- and Mandarin-speaking children with and…

We tested the relation between vocal emotion and vocal pitch perception abilities in adults with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and pairwise matched adults with typical development. The ASD group had impaired vocal but typical non-vocal pitch and vocal timbre perception abilities. The ASD group showed less accurate vocal emotion…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often exhibit disordered speech prosody, but sources of disordered prosody remain poorly understood. We explored patterns of temporal alignment and prosodic grouping in a speech-based metronome repetition task as well as manual coordination in a drum tapping task among Cantonese speakers with ASD and…

It is known that individuals with Asperger syndrome (AS) may show no problems with regard to what is said (e.g., lexical content) but tend to have difficulties in how utterances are produced, i.e., they may show prosodic impairments. In the present study, we focus on the use of prosodic features to express grammatical meaning. Specifically, we…

The present study investigates the comprehension of syntactic and affective prosody in adults with autism spectrum disorder without accompanying cognitive deficits (ASD w/o cognitive deficits) as well as age-, education- and gender-matched unimpaired adults, while processing orally presented sentences. Two experiments were conducted: (a) an…

Purpose: To investigate sensitivity to prosodic and semantic cues to emotion in individuals with high-functioning autism (HFA). Method: Emotional prosody and semantics were independently manipulated to assess the relative influence of prosody versus semantics on speech processing. A sample of 10-year-old typically developing children (n = 10) and…

This study examined the acceptability of a mobile application, "SpeechPrompts," designed to treat prosodic disorders in children with ASD and other communication impairments. Ten speech-language pathologists (SLPs) in public schools and 40 of their students, 5-19 years with prosody deficits participated. Students received treatment with…

Prosody production atypicalities are a feature of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), but behavioral measures of performance have failed to provide detail on the properties of these deficits. We used acoustic measures of prosody to compare children with ASDs to age-matched groups with learning disabilities and typically developing peers. Overall,…

In order to study problems of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) with morphosyntax, we investigated twenty high-functioning Greek-speaking children (mean age: 6;11) and twenty age- and language-matched typically developing children on environments that allow or forbid object clitics or their corresponding noun phrase. Children with…

English-speaking children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are less capable of using prosodic cues such as intonation for irony comprehension. Prosodic cues, in particular intonation, in Cantonese are relatively restricted while sentence-final particles (SFPs) may be used for this pragmatic function. This study investigated the use of prosodic…

In research, it has been difficult to characterize the prosodic production differences that have been observed clinically in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Moreover, the nature of these differences has been particularly hard to identify. This study examined one possible contributor to these perceived differences: motor planning. We examined the…

This study validated a video game paradigm to explore attention to prosodic and linguistic components of spoken sentences in nine moderate-to-low functioning children with autism and impaired verbal skills. Nine typically developing children were also included. The children listened to pre-recorded sentences varying with respect to content (e.g.,…