Lab perceptual training and robot-assisted training in improving speech prosody of autistic children

Children with autism spectrum disorder are known to exhibit both social and language difficulties. Speech prosody is known to be easily noticeable, which has been shown to have far-reaching influences in the academic and social life of autistic individuals. This study examined two training programs on the speech prosody of autistic children, who tend to avoid social speech signals. The first program is a lab perceptual training program without social interaction, while the second utilizes a social robot to provide training with controlled, simulated social interaction. Ninety-two children in total were recruited with sixty-nine participants formally diagnosed with ASD and twenty-three children were typically developing children without any language or speech disorder. Our results showed that both lab perceptual training and robot-assisted training with simulated social interactions led to improvement in the use of speech prosody by autistic children. Although social interaction is considered critical in language acquisition for typical population, autistic individuals tend not to prefer social speech signals, which is hypothesized to lead to their social and language deficits. This study hence proposes two successful alternative ways to facilitate their learning of language through lab perceptual training and simulated human-robot interaction.