Doctoral Dissertations

Lynn Adams

Date of Award

5-1993

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Speech and Hearing Science

Major Professor

Sol Adler

Committee Members

Harold Peterson, Pearl Gordon, Mick Nordquist

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine prosody in the speech of high-functioning autistic children in a variety of speaking situations. High-functioning autistic children and normally developing children between the ages of 11-0 and 14-0 years served as the two groups of subjects. Experimental tasks included syllable pattern repetition, sentence repetition and conversation. The recorded speech samples were analyzed acoustically for fundamental frequency, intensity, and syllables per second. The samples were also judged by trained listeners for perception of pitch, loudness and speaking rate. Group differences and task effects were explored. Group differences were observed on one of the acoustical measures (fundamental frequency) and on all of the perceptual measures (pitch, loudness, speaking rate). Group and task interactions were not observed on either the acoustical or perceptual analyses. Group differences were observed on accuracy of pattern repetition with the autistic group demonstrating less accuracy on both repetition tasks. Group differences were also found when the conversational samples were judged for use of intonation and stress with the experimental group being rated as abnormal on both variables. Significant correlations were found between the perceptual and acoustic measures on some of the tasks. The results of this study suggest that listeners judge speech samples of high-functioning autistic children to be different, however these differences were not accounted for from the acoustic analysis used in this investigation. The high-functioning autistic children were less accurate on pattern repetition and their intonation and stress patterns were found to be abnormal compared to the normally developing group. It was concluded that even when the severity of the autistic syndrome was mild, listeners perceived differences in the use of prosody in various speaking situations. Implications for intervention as well as future research were discussed.

Download
Files over 3MB may be slow to open. For best results, right-click and select "save as..."

Share

COinS