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Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.500.12289/22
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Item Prosodic boundary in the speech of children with autism(2007-08) Peppé, Sue JEExpressive prosody is thought to be disordered in autism, and this study sets out to evaluate one aspect (prosodic boundary) to investigate a) how nave judges rate utterances for atypicality; b) whether pitch and duration measurements in those utterances differ from those of typicallydeveloping children; and c) whether children with autism can use prosodic boundary in speech for linguistic distinctions. Samples were drawn from children aged between 5 and 13 years; 31 with language-delayed high-functioning autism (LDHFA), 40 with Asperger's syndrome (AS) and 119 with typical development (TD). Results showed that nave judges perceived children with LD-HFA as sounding more atypical than those with AS, who in turn were marginally more atypical than those with TD. Measurements suggested those with LDHFA had wider pitch-span than those with TD. The groups did not differ on linguistic functionality, and it is possible that factors other than prosody contributed to the perception of atypicality.Item Prosody and its relationship to language in school-aged children with high-functioning autism(2007-11) McCann, Joanne; Peppé, Sue JE; Gibbon, Fiona; O'Hare, Anne; Rutherford, MarionBackground: Disordered expressive prosody is a widely reported characteristic of individuals with autism. Despite this, it has received little attention in the literature and the few studies that have addressed it have not described its relationship to other aspects of communication. Aims: To determine the nature and relationship of expressive and receptive language, phonology, pragmatics, and non-verbal ability in school-aged children with high-functioning autism and to determine how prosody relates to these abilities and which aspects of prosody are most affected. Methods & Procedures: A total of 31 children with high-functioning autism and 72 typically developing children matched for verbal mental age completed a battery of speech, language, and non-verbal assessments and a procedure for assessing receptive and expressive prosody. Outcomes & Results: Language skills varied, but the majority of children with high-functioning autism had deficits in at least one aspect of language with expressive language most severely impaired. All of the children with high-functioning autism had difficulty with at least one aspect of prosody and prosodic ability correlated highly with expressive and receptive language. The children with high-functioning autism showed significantly poorer prosodic skills than the control group, even after adjusting for verbal mental age. Conclusions: Investigating prosody and its relationship to language in autism is clinically important because expressive prosodic disorders add an additional social and communication barrier for these children and problems are often life-long even when other areas of language improve. Furthermore, a receptive prosodic impairment may have implications not only for understanding the many functions of prosody but also for general language comprehension. 2007 Royal College of Speech & Language Therapists.Item Receptive and expressive prosodic ability in children with high-functioning autism(American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, 2007) Peppé, Sue JE; McCann, Joanne; Gibbon, Fiona; O'Hare, Anne; Rutherford, MarionPurpose: This study aimed to identify the nature and extent of receptive and expressive prosodic deficits in children with high-functioning autism (HFA). Method: Thirty-one children with HFA, 72 typically developing controls matched on verbal mental age, and 33 adults with normal speech completed the prosody assessment procedure, Profiling Elements of Prosodic Systems in Children. Results: Children with HFA performed significantly less well than controls on 11 of 12 prosody tasks (p < .005). Receptive prosodic skills showed a strong correlation (p < .01) with verbal mental age in both groups, and to a lesser extent with expressive prosodic skills. Receptive prosodic scores also correlated with expressive prosody scores, particularly in grammatical prosodic functions. Prosodic development in the HFA group appeared to be delayed in many aspects of prosody and deviant in some. Adults showed near-ceiling scores in all tasks. Conclusions: The study demonstrates that receptive and expressive prosodic skills are closely associated in HFA. Receptive prosodic skills would be an appropriate focus for clinical intervention, and further investigation of prosody and the relationship between prosody and social skills is warranted.Item Intonation features of the expression of emotions in Spanish: preliminary study for a prosody assessment procedure(Informa Healthcare, 2008-04) Martinez-Castilla, P.; Peppé, Sue JEThis study aimed to find out what intonation features reliably represent the emotions of liking as opposed to disliking in the Spanish language, with a view to designing a prosody assessment procedure for use with children with speech and language disorders. 18 intonationally different prosodic realisations (tokens) of one word (lim_n) were recorded by one native Spanish speaker. The tokens were deemed representative of two categories of emotion: liking or disliking of the taste lemon. 30 native Spanish speakers assigned them to the two categories and rated their expressiveness on a six-point scale. For all tokens except two, agreement between judges as to category was highly significant, some tokens attracting 100% agreement. The intonation contours most related to expressiveness levels were: for liking, an inverted U form contour with exaggerated pitch peak within the tonic syllable; and for disliking, a flat melodic contour with a slight fall.Item Developing a test of prosodic ability for speakers of Iberian Spanish(Elsevier, 2008-11) Martinez-Castilla, P.; Peppé, Sue JEIn the absence of a Spanish prosody assessment procedure, an English one (Profiling Elements of Prosodic Systems-Children: PEPS-C) has been adapted for use with Iberian Spanish speakers. The paper describes the scope, principles and methods of the test and the modifications other than lexical translation that were required to produce a Spanish procedure. Findings from the first studies of data collected using the Spanish test are briefly considered: these suggest crosslinguistic parallels and English/Spanish differences in adult prosodic ability. Lengthier consideration is given to prosodic data from Spanish children and the use of prefinal contrastive accent in the two languages. We conclude that the test is a feasible and valid instrument for assessing Spanish prosodic ability and indicate possible directions for further research. 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.Item Assessing prosodic and pragmatic ability in children with high-functioning autism(2006) Peppé, Sue JE; McCann, Joanne; Gibbon, Fiona; O'Hare, Anne; Rutherford, MarionChildren with high-functioning autism are widely reported to show deficits in both prosodic and pragmatic ability. New procedures for assessing both of these are now available and have been used in a study of 31 children with high-functioning autism and 72 controls. Some of the findings from a review of the literature on prosodic skills in individuals with autism are presented, and it is shown how these skills are addressed in a new prosodic assessment procedure, PEPS-C. A case study of a child with high-functioning autism shows how his prosodic skills can be evaluated on the prosody assessment procedure, and how his skills compare with those of controls. He is also assessed for pragmatic ability. Results of both assessments are considered together to show how, in the case of this child, specific prosodic skill-levels can affect pragmatic ability.Item The Relationship between Form and Function Level Receptive Prosodic Abilities in Autism(Springer Science & Business Media B.V., 2008) Järvinen-Pasley, Anna; Peppé, Sue JE; King-Smth, G.; Heaton, P.Prosody can be conceived as having form (auditory-perceptual characteristics) and function (pragmatic/linguistic meaning). No known studies have examined the relationship between form- and function-level prosodic skills in relation to the effects of stimulus length and/or complexity upon such abilities in autism. Research in this area is both insubstantial and inconclusive. Children with autism and controls completed the receptive tasks of the Profiling Elements of Prosodic Systems in Children (PEPS-C) test, which examines both form- and function-level skills, and a sentence-level task assessing the understanding of intonation. While children with autism were unimpaired in both form and function tasks at the single-word level, they showed significantly poorer performance in the corresponding sentence-level tasks than controls. Implications for future research are discussed.Item The prosody-language relationship in children with high-functioning autism(2006) McCann, Joanne; Peppé, Sue JE; Gibbon, Fiona; O'Hare, Anne; Rutherford, MarionAbstract In Kanner's original description of autism he noted disordered prosody as a common feature. Despite this, the area has received very little attention in the literature and those studies that have addressed prosody in autism have not addressed its relationship to other aspects of communication. This chapter will give an overview of research in this area to date and summarise the findings of a study designed to investigate the prosody and language skills of 31 children with high functioning autism. Two case studies of children with autism will be used to illustrate the relationship between language and prosody and to emphasise the prosodic impairment present in many children with autism.Item Receptive and expressive prosodic ability in children with high-functioning autism.(QMU Speech Science Research Centre, 2006) Peppé, Sue JE; McCann, Joanne; Gibbon, Fiona; O'Hare, Anne; Rutherford, MarionAbstract This study aimed to identify the nature and extent of receptive and expressive prosodic deficits in children with high-functioning autism. In a data-based group study, 31 children with high-functioning autism (HFA, excluding Asperger's syndrome) and 72 typically developing controls matched on verbal mental age completed a prosody assessment procedure (PEPS-C). Children with HFA performed significantly less well than controls on eleven out of twelve prosody tasks (p < .005). Receptive prosodic skills showed strong correlation (p < .01) with verbal mental age in both groups, as did, to a lesser extent, expressive prosodic skills. Receptive prosodic scores also correlated with expressive prosody scores, particularly in grammatical prosodic functions(turnend and prosodic phrasing/ chunking). Prosodic development in the HFA group appeared to be delayed in many aspects of prosody and deviant in some (e.g. accent tended to be placed early in focus tasks and Same items were often perceived as Different in auditory discrimination tasks). The study demonstrates that receptive prosodic deficit, expressive prosodic skills, and language development are closely associated in the condition of autism. Receptive prosodic skills would be an appropriate focus for clinical intervention, and further investigation of atypical expressive prosody and the relationship between prosody and social skills is warranted.Item Assessing prosodic and pragmatic ability in children with high-functioning autism.(2006) Peppé, Sue JE; McCann, Joanne; Gibbon, Fiona; O'Hare, Anne; Rutherford, MarionChildren with high-functioning autism are widely reported to show deficits in both prosodic and pragmatic ability. New procedures for assessing both of these are now available and have been used in a study of 31 children with high-functioning autism and 72 controls. Some of the findings from a review of the literature on prosodic skills in individuals with autism are presented, and it is shown how these skills are addressed in a new prosodic assessment procedure, PEPS-C. A case study of a child with high-functioning autism shows how his prosodic skills can be evaluated on the prosody assessment procedure, and how his skills compare with those of controls. He is also assessed for pragmatic ability. Results of both assessments are considered together to show how, in the case of this child, specific prosodic skill-levels can affect pragmatic ability.