Prosodic characteristics in young children with autism spectrum disorder

Abstract

The prosody of high-functioning adults and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has been reported to differ from that of typically developing individuals. The present study investigated whether young children under eight years old with ASD differ in prosodic characteristics compared with neurotypical children matched on expressive language ability. Seven children with ASD (38–93 months) and seven neurotypical children (20–30 months) were recorded during naturalistic interactions with a parent. Naïve listeners (n = 18) were recruited to rate utterances for: (i) age, (ii) percentage of intelligible words, (iii) pitch, (iv) speech rate, (v) degree of animation, and (vi) certainty of diagnosis. An acoustic analysis was also conducted of speech rate and fundamental frequency (F0). Results of the rating task showed no statistically significant difference on any measure except estimated age. However, children in the ASD group had a significantly lower mean, maximum, and minimum F0 than children in the control group; there was no significant difference between groups for speech rate. These findings may indicate that speech characteristics alone are unlikely to be a sufficient early sign of an ASD diagnosis.