ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2006
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2006

Functionality and perceived atypicality of expressive prosody in children with autism spectrum disorders

Sue Peppé, Pastora Martinez Castilla, Robin Lickley, Ineke Mennen, Joanne McCann, Anne O’Hare, Marion Rutherford

People with autism are perceived to have ‘odd’ prosody, but is it malfunctioning? A new prosody test assesses the functionality of prosody in four aspects of speech (phrasing, affect, turn-end and focus) by tasks that elicit utterances in which prosody alone conveys the meaning. The test was used with 100 typically-developing children (TD), 39 with Asperger's syndrome (AspS) and 31 with high-functioning autism (HFA). In results, HFA