Prosodic development in middle childhood and adolescence in high-functioning autism

Language in autism: domains, profiles and co-occurring conditions

This article reviews the current knowledge state on pragmatic and structural language abilities in autism and their potential relation to extralinguistic abilities and autistic traits. The focus is on questions regarding autism language profiles with varying degrees of (selective) impairment and with respect to potential comorbidity of autism and language impairment: Is language impairment in autism the co-occurrence of two distinct conditions (comorbidity), a consequence of autism itself (no comorbidity), or one possible combination from a series of neurodevelopmental properties (dimensional approach)? As for language profiles in autism, three main groups are identified, namely, (i) verbal autistic individuals without structural language impairment, (ii) verbal autistic individuals with structural language impairment, and (iii) minimally verbal autistic individuals. However, this tripartite distinction hides enormous linguistic heterogeneity. Regarding the nature of language impairment in autism, there is currently no model of how language difficulties may interact with autism characteristics and with various extralinguistic cognitive abilities. Building such a model requires carefully designed explorations that address specific aspects of language and extralinguistic cognition. This should lead to a fundamental increase in our understanding of language impairment in autism, thereby paving the way for a substantial contribution to the question of how to best characterize neurodevelopmental disorders.

Impairments in recognition of emotional facial expressions, affective prosody, and multisensory facilitation of response time in high-functioning autism

Introduction

Deficits in emotional perception are common in autistic people, but it remains unclear to which extent these perceptual impairments are linked to specific sensory modalities, specific emotions or multisensory facilitation.

Methods

This study aimed to investigate uni- and bimodal perception of emotional cues as well as multisensory facilitation in autistic (n = 18, mean age: 36.72 years, SD: 11.36) compared to non-autistic (n = 18, mean age: 36.41 years, SD: 12.18) people using auditory, visual and audiovisual stimuli.

Results

Lower identification accuracy and longer response time were revealed in high-functioning autistic people. These differences were independent of modality and emotion and showed large effect sizes (Cohen's d 0.8-1.2). Furthermore, multisensory facilitation of response time was observed in non-autistic people that was absent in autistic people, whereas no differences were found in multisensory facilitation of accuracy between the two groups.

Discussion

These findings suggest that processing of auditory and visual components of audiovisual stimuli is carried out more separately in autistic individuals (with equivalent temporal demands required for processing of the respective unimodal cues), but still with similar relative improvement in accuracy, whereas earlier integrative multimodal merging of stimulus properties seems to occur in non-autistic individuals.

Receptive and expressive lexical stress in adolescents with autism

Purpose: Lexical stress abilities were investigated in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) compared to typically developing (TD) controls. We hypothesised that individuals with ASD would demonstrate atypical prosody on lexical and phrase stress tasks and are perceived by listeners as sounding unnatural.Method: A between-group study was conducted to investigate lexical stress abilities among adolescents (12-20 years) with ASD (n = 11) compared to TD controls (n = 11) matched for age and gender. Two tasks were administered to assess the ability to receptively and expressively distinguish nouns from verbs and a noun phrase from a compound noun. Receptive tasks required participants to select visual stimuli corresponding with the utterance they heard. Expressive tasks were rated using perceptual judgments of accuracy, perceptual and acoustic measurements of duration and perceptual ratings of "naturalness."Result: Individuals with ASD performed with significantly less accuracy on all prosody tasks, significantly longer duration of utterances, and were rated as sounding "unnatural" at a significantly higher rate than controls.Conclusion: This study provides converging evidence that supports atypical prosody is influenced by longer duration of utterances and less accurate lexical and phrase stress. The clinical implications of this study support early assessment and intervention of prosodic disorders in ASD.

Strong Relationship Between Rapid Auditory Processing and Affective Prosody Recognition Among Adults with High Autistic Traits

This study investigated whether individuals with high autistic traits rely on psychoacoustic abilities in affective prosody recognition (APR). In 94 college students, Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) and psychoacoustic abilities were measured. Results indicated that higher AQ, higher rapid auditory processing (RAP), and maleness were associated with a lower APR accuracy for low-intensity prosodies. There was a strong positive association between RAP and APR for participants with high AQ, whereas low-AQ participants showed no such pattern. The findings suggest a reliance on psychoacoustic abilities as compensatory mechanism for deficits in higher-order processing of emotional signals in social interactions, and imply potential benefits of auditory interventions in improving APR among individuals with high autistic traits.

The Multidimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP)

Prosody can be defined as the rhythm and intonation patterns spanning words, phrases and sentences. Accurate perception of prosody is an important component of many aspects of language processing, such as parsing grammatical structures, recognizing words, and determining where emphasis may be placed. Prosody perception is important for language acquisition and can be impaired in language-related developmental disorders. However, existing assessments of prosodic perception suffer from some shortcomings.  These include being unsuitable for use with typically developing adults due to ceiling effects and failing to allow the investigator to distinguish the unique contributions of individual acoustic features such as pitch and temporal cues. Here we present the Multi-Dimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP), a novel tool for the assessment of prosody perception. It consists of two subtests: Linguistic Focus, which measures the ability to hear emphasis or sentential stress, and Phrase Boundaries, which measures the ability to hear where in a compound sentence one phrase ends, and another begins. Perception of individual acoustic dimensions (Pitch and Duration) can be examined separately, and test difficulty can be precisely calibrated by the experimenter because stimuli were created using a continuous voice morph space. We present validation analyses from a sample of 59 individuals and discuss how the battery might be deployed to examine perception of prosody in various populations.

The Multidimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP)

Prosody can be defined as the rhythm and intonation patterns spanning words, phrases and sentences. Accurate perception of prosody is an important component of many aspects of language processing, such as parsing grammatical structures, recognizing words, and determining where emphasis may be placed. Prosody perception is important for language acquisition and can be impaired in language-related developmental disorders. However, existing assessments of prosodic perception suffer from some shortcomings.  These include being unsuitable for use with typically developing adults due to ceiling effects and failing to allow the investigator to distinguish the unique contributions of individual acoustic features such as pitch and temporal cues. Here we present the Multi-Dimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP), a novel tool for the assessment of prosody perception. It consists of two subtests: Linguistic Focus, which measures the ability to hear emphasis or sentential stress, and Phrase Boundaries, which measures the ability to hear where in a compound sentence one phrase ends, and another begins. Perception of individual acoustic dimensions (Pitch and Duration) can be examined separately, and test difficulty can be precisely calibrated by the experimenter because stimuli were created using a continuous voice morph space. We present validation analyses from a sample of 59 individuals and discuss how the battery might be deployed to examine perception of prosody in various populations.

Perception and Production of Statement-Question Intonation in Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Developmental Investigation

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 to discriminate (in both speech and music conditions), identify, and imitate statement-question intonation were intact in individuals with ASD across age cohorts. Sensitivity to pitch direction predicted performance on intonation processing in both groups, who also exhibited similar developmental changes. These findings provide evidence for shared mechanisms in pitch processing between speech and music, as well as associations between low- and high-level pitch processing and between perception and production of pitch.

Recognition of affective prosody in autism spectrum conditions: A systematic review and meta-analysis

LAY ABSTRACT

Differences in understanding others' emotions and attitudes through features in speech (e.g. intonation) have been observed in individuals with autism spectrum conditions, which contribute greatly to their social communication challenges. However, some studies reported that individuals with autism spectrum condition performed comparably to typically developing individuals on affective prosody recognition. Here, we provide a comprehensive review with statistical analysis of 23 existing studies on this topic to examine potential factors that could explain the discrepancies. Compared with typically developing individuals, autism spectrum condition participants generally appeared to encounter more difficulties in affective prosody recognition. But this finding was likely due to the tendency of the existing research to overly focus on deficits in autism. The affective prosody recognition performance in individuals with autism spectrum condition was closely related to the number of answer options offered to them. Moreover, the degree of difficulty in affective prosody recognition encountered by individuals with autism spectrum condition varied across emotions. The findings of this systematic review highlighted the need for further research on affective prosody recognition in autism (e.g. studies that include tonal language speakers and autism spectrum condition individuals with lower cognitive or verbal abilities).

Neural evidence for reduced automaticity in processing emotional prosody among men with high levels of autistic traits

This study aimed to examine individual differences in the integration of emotional prosody when processing semantic meaning in speech among men with high and low levels of autistic traits, as measured by the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ). The behavioral and neural responses of high- and low-AQ men during semantic valence judgment were compared. The stimuli were positive or negative words spoken with either happy or sad prosody; in other words, the prosody was either congruous or incongruous to the valence of meaning. Participants were required to judge the (positive vs. negative) valence of word meaning as accurately and as quickly as possible while ignoring emotional prosody. Behavioral results showed that high-AQ men responded significantly more slowly than low-AQ men in all stimulus conditions, indicating lower automaticity in processing emotional speech. Neural data revealed that low-AQ men (but not high-AQ men) had significantly increased N200 and N400 amplitudes for incongruous (compared to congruous) stimuli spoken with happy prosody. Our findings supported our hypotheses that high levels of autistic traits are associated with reduced behavioral automaticity and less differential neural resources allocated to processing emotional speech stimuli with different cognitive demands.

Production and perception of emotional prosody by adults with autism spectrum disorder

This study examined production and perception of affective prosody by adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Previous research has reported increased pitch variability in talkers with ASD compared to typically developing (TD) controls in grammatical speaking tasks (e.g., comparing interrogative vs. declarative sentences), but it is unclear whether this pattern extends to emotional speech. In this study, speech recordings in five emotion contexts (angry, happy, interested, sad, and neutral) were obtained from 15 adult males with ASD and 15 controls (Experiment 1), and were later presented to 52 listeners (22 with ASD) who were asked to identify the emotion expressed and rate the level of naturalness of the emotion in each recording (Experiment 2). Compared to the TD group, talkers with ASD produced phrases with greater intensity, longer durations, and increased pitch range for all emotions except neutral, suggesting that their greater pitch variability was specific to emotional contexts. When asked to identify emotion from speech, both groups of listeners were more accurate at identifying the emotion context from speech produced by ASD speakers compared to TD speakers, but rated ASD emotional speech as sounding less natural. Collectively, these results reveal differences in emotional speech production in talkers with ASD that provide an acoustic basis for reported perceptions of oddness in the speech presentation of adults with ASD. Autism Res 2017, 10: 1991-2001. © 2017 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

LAY SUMMARY

This study examined emotional speech communication produced and perceived by adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically-developing (TD) controls. Compared to the TD group, talkers with ASD produced emotional phrases that were louder, longer, and more variable in pitch. Both ASD and TD listeners were more accurate at identifying emotion in speech produced by ASD speakers compared to TD speakers, but rated ASD emotional speech as sounding less natural.

Assessing pragmatic language in autism spectrum disorder: the Yale in vivo Pragmatic Protocol

PURPOSE

This study compared pragmatic language in youths (9-17 years) with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and those with typical development (TD) on the Yale in vivo Pragmatic Protocol (YiPP), a semistructured, dynamic conversational assessment.

METHOD

Participants (n = 118) were divided into groups based on age and diagnosis. Each completed the YiPP, which included 4 pragmatic domains (discourse management, communicative functions, conversational repair, presupposition). The participant's response to each probe was scored correct or incorrect; incorrect scores elicited cues from the examiner, and level of cue required for a correction was also scored.

RESULTS

The YiPP showed high reliability and internal consistency, with moderate concurrent validity, sensitivity, and specificity. The group with ASD performed worse overall on YiPP probes compared to their TD counterparts on both error (d = 0.96) and cue (d = 0.91) scores. Item analyses revealed greater gaps between older students with ASD and their TD peers than between the 2 younger groups.

CONCLUSIONS

These data suggest that a probe measure designed to assess pragmatic abilities in children with ASD within a conversational context has some validity for contributing to diagnostic classification and can identify specific areas of pragmatic vulnerabilities as part of a clinical assessment.