Receptive and expressive prosodic ability in children with high-functioning autism
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Date
2007Author
Pepp, Sue JE
McCann, Joanne
Gibbon, Fiona
O'Hare, Anne
Rutherford, Marion
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Pepp̩, S., McCann, J., Gibbon, F., O''Hare, A. & Rutherford, M. (2007) Receptive and expressive prosodic ability in children with high-functioning autism, Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 50, , pp. 1015-1028,
Abstract
Purpose: 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.