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…

This study examined prosody through characterization of acoustic properties of the speech of individuals with ASD and their parents, during narration. A subset of utterances were low-pass filtered and rated for differences in intonation, speech rate, and rhythm. Listener ratings were minimally related to acoustic measures, underscoring the…

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…

Purpose: Numerous studies have identified individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) with deficits in unichannel emotion perception and multisensory integration. However, only limited research is available on multichannel emotion perception in ASD. The purpose of this review was to seek conceptual clarification, identify knowledge gaps, and…

In this exploratory study, we examined stress contrastivity within real word productions elicited via picture naming in 20 children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and 20 typical peers group-wise matched on age and vocabulary. Targets had a dominant pattern of lexical stress beginning with a strong-weak pattern (SW: 'caterpillar',…

We investigated production of lexical stress in children with and without autism spectrum disorders (ASD), all monolingual Italian speakers. The mean age of the 16 autistic children was 5.73 years and the mean age of the 16 typically developing children was 4.65 years. Picture-naming targets were five trisyllabic words that began with a…

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…

Although prosodic deficits have been reported to occur with many different populations, little published research addresses treatment options for these deficits. This study was designed to examine one treatment's impact, the six-step imitative approach, on the expressive affective prosody of an adolescent with autism who had average intelligence…

The current study investigated whether those with higher levels of autism-like traits process emotional information from speech differently to those with lower levels of autism-like traits. Neurotypical adults completed the autism-spectrum quotient and an emotional priming task. Vocal primes with varied emotional prosody, semantics, or a…

We longitudinally investigated the development of deictic and general accompanying gestures in one 5-year-old boy with autism spectrum condition (ASC) and intellectual disability. The investigation was performed during an intervention focusing on phonological segments. The purpose was to see whether gestures developed in conjunction with language.…

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…

Social communication is one of the key components of successful interaction. People with autism can have significant challenges with social communication, resulting in some of the highest rates of depression and anxiety. In fact, young adults with autism have suicide rates that are 28 times higher than the general population. Thus, supporting…

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…

Purpose: One promising early marker for autism and other communicative and language disorders is early infant speech production. Here we used daylong recordings of high- and low-risk infant-mother dyads to examine whether acoustic-prosodic alignment as well as two automated measures of infant vocalization are related to developmental risk status…