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Prosody, the intonation and inflection of spoken language, serves to change or enhance the meaning of what is being said, through elements such as pitch, loudness, speech rate and rhythm. “Contrastive stress” is an area of particular difficulty for those with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD; Paul et al., 2005; Peppé et al., 2007).
Objectives: This study asks whether processing of prosodic information in ASD is affected more by semantic context or by the prosodic forms of speech.
Methods:
Typically developed (TD) young adults completed the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001) and tests of receptive prosody assessing the impact of semantic/lexical information and prosodic factors (n=22, 8 males, 14 females).We assessed whether the context of speech would influence the time taken and the accuracy of listeners’ ability to identify stress on words. In addition, we assessed the listeners’ ability to identify stress in a phrase without any semantic or lexical information using laryngeal recordings.
Results: Participants were less accurate and slower at identifying which word carried stress when it was on a word that was incongruent with the semantic context of the sentence than when it was congruent. Those with more autistic traits were however less influenced by the semantic context of the sentence.
When the semantic context was removed from the sentence and a laryngeal recording was used we found that as autistic traits increased accuracy scores decreased, suggesting that an increased amount of autistic traits is associated with worse performance on the prosody test.
Conclusions:
Our study suggests that prosodic processing in typically developed young adults is significantly influenced by semantic context. As autistic traits increase it appears that identification of where stress lies in a sentence is more difficult, and that the semantic context of a sentence has less influence.