Abstract

Purpose
The purpose of this study was to examine relationships between prosodic speech cues and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) severity, hypothesizing a mutually interactive relationship between the speech characteristics of the psychologist and the child. The authors objectively quantified acoustic-prosodic cues of the psychologist and of the child with ASD during spontaneous interaction, establishing a methodology for future large-sample analysis.
Method
Speech acoustic-prosodic features were semiautomatically derived from segments of semistructured interviews (Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, ADOS; Lord, Rutter, DiLavore, & Risi, 1999; Lord et al., 2012) with 28 children who had previously been diagnosed with ASD. Prosody was quantified in terms of intonation, volume, rate, and voice quality. Research hypotheses were tested via correlation as well as hierarchical and predictive …

Date

2014

Authors

Daniel Bone, Chi-Chun Lee, Matthew P Black, Marian E Williams, Sungbok Lee, Pat Levitt, Shrikanth Narayanan

Journal

Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research

Volume

57

Issue

4

Pages

1162-1177

Publisher

American Speech-Language-Hearing Association