A Crosslinguistic Investigation of Prosodic Patterns Related to Autism Spectrum Disorder

This project is directed towards the speech prosody of preadolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) without language or intellectual impairment. ASD is characterized e.g. by restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests or activities, deficits in social-emotional reciprocity and nonverbal communication, as well as deficits in developing, maintaining and understanding relationships. This project is directed towards the prosodic characteristics of persons with ASD having different native languages (Finnish, Swedish, English and French). 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 will study how autistic persons themselves perceive and rate deviant features in other ASD speakers’ speech. This will be studied experimentally, instrumentally and qualitatively. First, these features will be studied separately in each language and then the findings will be compared. In addition to defining the prosodic features that characterize ASD persons’ speech by methods of acoustic phonetics, this project will include psycholinguistic experiments (perception tests) that will show to what extent neurotypical people (i.e. non-autistic persons) and autistic persons themselves find these features deviant. Autistic persons’ way to use prosodic features in interaction will be studied by methods of interactional linguistics.