Prosody production atypicalities are a feature of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), but behavioral measures of performance have failed to provide detail on the properties of these deficits. We used acoustic measures of prosody to compare children with ASDs to age-matched groups with learning disabilities and typically developing peers. Overall,…

This study examined the acceptability of a mobile application, "SpeechPrompts," designed to treat prosodic disorders in children with ASD and other communication impairments. Ten speech-language pathologists (SLPs) in public schools and 40 of their students, 5-19 years with prosody deficits participated. Students received treatment with…

In research, it has been difficult to characterize the prosodic production differences that have been observed clinically in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Moreover, the nature of these differences has been particularly hard to identify. This study examined one possible contributor to these perceived differences: motor planning. We examined the…

This paper reports a study of the ability to reproduce stress in a nonsense syllable imitation task by adolescent speakers with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), as compared to typically developing (TD) age-mates. Results are reported for both raters' judgments of the subjects' stress production, as well as acoustic measures of pitch range and…

This study compared the speech and prosody-voice profiles for 30 male speakers with either high-functioning autism (HFA) or Asperger syndrome (AS), and 53 typically developing male speakers. Both HFA and AS groups had more residual articulation distortion errors and utterances coded as inappropriate for phrasing, stress, and resonance. AS speakers…

Speakers with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) show difficulties in suprasegmental aspects of speech production, or "prosody," those aspects of speech that accompany words and sentences and create what is commonly called "tone of voice." However, little is known about the perception of prosody, or about the specific aspects of…

Shriberg "et al." [Shriberg, L. "et al." (2001). "Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, 44," 1097-1115] described prosody-voice features of 30 high functioning speakers with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) compared to age-matched control speakers. The present study reports additional information on the speakers with ASD, including…