A Crosslinguistic Investigation of Prosodic Patterns Related to Autism Spectrum Disorder: Acoustic, Experimental and Multimodal Analysis

‘Prosody’ encompasses phenomena related to speech rhythm, melody, stress, loudness, speech rate, duration and voice quality. This project is directed towards the speech prosody of preadolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). It is known that people with ASD often have deviant prosodic features in their speech. When these features occur, they constitute a significant obstacle to the social acceptance of the individual. This project examines the prosodic characteristics of persons with ASD whose native language is French or Finnish. The main objective of the project consists of discovering the prosodic features that characterize people with ASD independently of the native language of the person. In addition, the project examines for example the perception on atypicality by persons with ASD themselves, the congruence between prominence and hand gestures as well as the way persons with ASD use prosody in spontaneous interaction.