LING Talk: Reiko Mazuka (Waseda U)

Tools in Intonational Phonology can highlight the nature of prosody in Japanese children with ASD: Dissociating linguistic and para-linguistic aspects of intonation

Abstract: People with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have long been known to have atypical prosodic features in their speech. Yet their prosodic differences from typically developing (TD) people have not been well-understood. In this talk, I will argue that the use of the tools in intonational phonology could provide us with a new perspective in understanding the nature of ASD children’s prosody. In an elicited production task, Japanese high-functioning ASD children were found that they can produce lexically and syntactically determined aspects of prosody intact. In contrast, their natural conversation with an adult contained significantly more frequent occurrence of “atypical features” of prosody compared to TD children. The majority of the atypical features are related to social, pragmatic communication, such as unnecessarily loud emphasis, or use of inappropriate boundary pitch movement, resulting in turn taking problem. Furthermore, the frequency of “atypical features” contained in the children’s conversation was highly correlated (.698) with the physiological indices of acoustic startle response (ASR) from the same children. These results suggest that the difficulty in ASD children’s prosody is primarily associated with the core symptom of ASD, viz., the difficulty in social, communicative interaction with others, and not with their linguistic ability to produce speech.