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Author ORCID Identifier
AccessType
Open Access Dissertation
Document Type
dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Program
Communication Disorders
Year Degree Awarded
2020
Month Degree Awarded
May
First Advisor
Mary Andrianopoulos
Second Advisor
Shelley Velleman
Third Advisor
William Matthews
Fourth Advisor
Nathaniel Whitmal
Subject Categories
Speech Pathology and Audiology
Abstract
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a lifelong neurodevelopmental condition that affects an individual’s social communication, social interaction, and behavior (American Psychological Association, 2013). A striking feature that distinguishes some individuals with autism from their peers without autism is “atypical” prosody. A between-group study was conducted to investigate prosody, speech motor control, auditory processing of pitch, and trained listener ratings of prosodic “naturalness” among adolescents with ASD (n=17) compared to TD controls (n=17) matched for age, gender and language. The specific aims of this study were to: (1) determine if individuals with ASD have significant acoustic-perceptual differences in their receptive and expressive prosody; (2) identify the interrelationship between prosody and language, motor speech, and pitch processing abilities; and (3) investigate if there is an association between group membership (ASD vs. TD) and trained listener ratings of overall “naturalness” (natural versus unnatural) of the speakers’ speech. The findings of this study support that some individuals with autism perform with significantly less accuracy on receptive and expressive prosody tasks and had significantly longer duration of utterances in comparison to TD controls. There was a significant positive relationship between receptive vocabulary and expressive prosody in the ASD group, supporting the “Theoretical Interaction Model”, while expressive vocabulary and speech motor control did not explain variability in expressive prosody above and beyond receptive vocabulary.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/mfm1-gm46
Recommended Citation
Gargan, Colleen, "Acoustic and Perceptual Characteristics of Prosody in Autism Spectrum Disorder: The Impact of Language, Motor Speech, and Auditory Processing" (2020). Doctoral Dissertations. 1964.
https://doi.org/10.7275/mfm1-gm46
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/1964
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.