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Structure and acoustics of the speech of verbal autistic preschoolers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 July 2023

Pauline MAES Open the ORCID record for Pauline MAES [Opens in a new window] ,
Marielle WEYLAND Open the ORCID record for Marielle WEYLAND [Opens in a new window]  and
Mikhail KISSINE Open the ORCID record for Mikhail KISSINE [Opens in a new window]
Pauline MAES*
Affiliation:
ACTE, LaDisco and ULB Neuroscience Institute, Université libre de Bruxelles, 1050 Brussels, Belgium
Marielle WEYLAND
Affiliation:
ACTE, LaDisco and ULB Neuroscience Institute, Université libre de Bruxelles, 1050 Brussels, Belgium
Mikhail KISSINE
Affiliation:
ACTE, LaDisco and ULB Neuroscience Institute, Université libre de Bruxelles, 1050 Brussels, Belgium
*
Corresponding author: Pauline Maes; Email: pauline.maes@ulb.be
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Abstract

In this study, we report an extensive investigation of the structural language and acoustical specificities of the spontaneous speech of ten three- to five-year-old verbal autistic children. The autistic children were compared to a group of ten typically developing children matched pairwise on chronological age, nonverbal IQ and socioeconomic status, and groupwise on verbal IQ and gender on various measures of structural language (phonetic inventory, lexical diversity and morpho-syntactic complexity) and a series of acoustical measures of speech (mean and range fundamental frequency, a formant dispersion index, syllable duration, jitter and shimmer). Results showed that, overall, the structure and acoustics of the verbal autistic children’s speech were highly similar to those of the TD children. Few remaining atypicalities in the speech of autistic children lay in a restricted use of different vocabulary items, a somewhat diminished morpho-syntactic complexity, and a slightly exaggerated syllable duration.

Keywords

autismstructural languageacousticsnaturalistic speech sample
Type
Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , May 2024 , pp. 509 - 525
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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