Assessment of speech and fine motor coordination in children with autism spectrum disorder.

Tanya Talkar,Maria Mody,Thomas F Quatieri,Daniel J Hannon,Douglas Sturim,Hrishikesh M Rao,Carol Stamm,James R Williamson,Kajal T Claypool,Lisa Nowinski,Hannah Saro,Sophia Yuditskaya,Christopher J Mcdougle

doi:10.1109/access.2020.3007348

Abstract

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder characterized by difficulty in communication, which includes a high incidence of speech production errors. We hypothesize that these errors are partly due to underlying deficits in motor coordination and control, which are also manifested in degraded fine motor control of facial expressions and purposeful hand movements. In this pilot study, we computed correlations of acoustic, video, and handwriting time-series derived from five children with ASD and five children with neurotypical development during speech and handwriting tasks. These correlations and eigenvalues derived from the correlations act as a proxy for motor coordination across articulatory, laryngeal, and respiratory speech production systems and for fine motor skills. We utilized features derived from these correlations to discriminate between children with and without ASD. Eigenvalues derived from these correlations highlighted differences in complexity of coordination across speech subsystems and during handwriting, and helped discriminate between the two subject groups. These results suggest differences in coupling within speech production and fine motor skill systems in children with ASD. Our long-term goal is to create a platform assessing motor coordination in children with ASD in order to track progress from speech and motor interventions administered by clinicians.

Highlights

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) undergo a large number of speech interventions in the home, the clinic, and at school to address communication difficulties at the core of the disorder [1]
This paper presents a pilot study assessing motor coordination in five children with ASD and five neurotypical controls using surrogate measures derived from multiple modalities, focusing on correlations across and within feature representations of speech subsystems and handwriting movements
We found that eigenvalues derived from correlation structures of time-series of the features, can be used to discriminate between the ASD and control subject groups with an area under the curve (AUC) of 1.00 for certain speech tasks and features

Summary

Introduction

A goal of our research is to design a speech assessment protocol that can be used in the clinic and the home setting, from which we can derive objective speech biomarkers that can aid in tracking subtle but meaningful changes in speech production due to speech interventions and can inform intervention decisions. Delay in the development of fine motor skills has been found to be common in ASD, and is typically a better predictor of diagnosis than gross motor skills [3]. In children, this can manifest in degraded control during handwriting

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