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Published on: October 3, 2018
Spaciousness as an acoustic measure of prosody in autistic children
Boram Kim1, Rhiannon Luyster2, Jason Bishop3,4,5
1Department of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, Lehman College, City University of New York, New York, New York 10468, USA.
Abstract:
Distinctive prosody has been reported in autism, yet acoustic studies have yielded inconsistent findings, particularly for F0-related measures. Two dynamic measures, spaciousness (magnitude of pitch excursions) and wiggliness (rate of pitch-direction changes), offer alternatives, but spaciousness has not yet been applied to English-speaking autistic children. The present study therefore compared acoustic characteristics of prosody from autistic and language-skill matched nonautistic children (age 3-7) using spaciousness, wiggliness, F0 measures (mean, standard deviation, and range), and speech rate. Linear mixed-effects models revealed that only spaciousness showed significant group differences, and these differences were independent of utterance length. Replication in larger samples is warranted.
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