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The Comprehension of Syntactic and Affective Prosody by Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder Without Accompanying Cognitive Deficits

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Abstract

The present study investigates the comprehension of syntactic and affective prosody in adults with autism spectrum disorder without accompanying cognitive deficits (ASD w/o cognitive deficits) as well as age-, education- and gender-matched unimpaired adults, while processing orally presented sentences. Two experiments were conducted: (a) an on-line sentence completion task containing local subject/object ambiguities and (b) an affective prosody task exploring the comprehension of six emotions. The syntactic prosody task revealed that the experimental group performed similar to the control group on the fillers and the object condition. On the other hand, the ASD w/o cognitive deficits group manifested lower accuracy compared to the unimpaired controls in the subject reading condition, as well as slower reaction times in all conditions. In the affective prosody task, the experimental group performed significantly worse than the controls in the recognition of the emotion of surprise, whereas no differences between the experimental and the control group were attested in the recognition of all other emotions. A positive correlation was found between the two tasks in the ASD w/o cognitive deficits group. Thus, individuals with ASD w/o cognitive deficits face slight difficulties with the decoding of prosody, both the syntactic and the affective one. More specifically, these difficulties are attested in the most difficult conditions, i.e. the subject reading and the emotion of surprise.

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Notes

  1. http://www.aspergerhellas.org/.

  2. http://paroutsas.jmc.gr/iqtest/classic.htm.

  3. Slashes indicate prosodic boundaries.

  4. The male speaker was 28 years old with 16 years of education and the female speaker was 29 years old with 18 years of education. Both participants use the standard Modern Greek variety.

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Funding

The present study has been co-financed by the European Union European Social Fund (ESF) and Greek national funds through the Operational Program “Education and Lifelong Learning” of the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF)—Research Funding Program: Heracleitus II. Investing in knowledge society through the European Social Fund.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Maria Martzoukou, Despina Papadopoulou & Mary-Helen Kosmidis

Authors
  1. Maria Martzoukou
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  2. Despina Papadopoulou
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  3. Mary-Helen Kosmidis
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Despina Papadopoulou.

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Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical Standards

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki does not have an ethics committee which evaluates and approves research proposals, with the exception of invasive studies carried out in the Medical School. The University-wide Research Ethics Committee only sets the ethical guidelines, and does not review individual proposals. We can affirm, however, that we followed the ethical guidelines set forth both by the University and by the Declaration of Helsinki regarding the ethical treatment of human participants in research.

Appendix

Appendix

Durations of the verb, the DP and the pauses and pitch range for the utterances produced by the female and the male speaker.

Gender

Items

Conditions

Verb (ms)

Pause (ms)

DP (ms)

Pitch range(Hertz)

Female

kaˈ\(\uptheta \)os sxeˈ\(\updelta \)iaze /ta ˈskitsa

S

0.631

No

0.482

229.788

Female

kaˈ\(\uptheta \)os sxeˈ\(\updelta \)iaze ta ˈskitsa/

O

0.619

No

0.638

243.999

Female

kaˈ\(\uptheta \)os ciniˈ\(\upgamma \)use/ta kuˈneʎa

S

0.626

No

0.522

256.838

Female

kaˈ\(\uptheta \)os ciniˈ\(\upgamma \)use ta kuˈneʎa/

O

0.481

No

0.766

247.539

Female

kaˈ\(\uptheta \)os ˈeplene/ta poˈtirʝa

S

0.431

No

0.493

264.795

Female

kaˈ\(\uptheta \)os ˈeplene ta poˈtirʝa/

O

0.335

No

0.778

232.070

Female

kaˈ\(\uptheta \)os ˈesproxne/ta traˈpezʝa

S

0.498

No

0.543

180.524

Female

kaˈ\(\uptheta \)os ˈesproxne ta traˈpezʝa/

O

0.452

No

0.744

185.086

Female

kaˈ\(\uptheta \)os ciˈtuse/ta aftoˈcinita

S

0.606

0.143

0.661

198.872

Female

kaˈ\(\uptheta \)os ciˈtuse ta aftoˈcinita/

O

0.404

No

0.958

280.595

Female

kaˈ\(\uptheta \)os ˈpotize/ta luˈlu\(\updelta \)ʝa

S

0.551

No

0.572

173.661

Female

kaˈ\(\uptheta \)os ˈpotize ta luˈlu\(\updelta \)ʝa/

O

0.379

No

0.756

182.389

male

kaˈ\(\uptheta \)os ˈerave/ ta kuˈbʝa

S

0.318

No

0.453

40.482

male

kaˈ\(\uptheta \)os ˈerave ta kuˈbʝa/

O

0.215

No

0.511

60.425

male

kaˈ\(\uptheta \)os ˈ\(\updelta \)ʝavaze/ta ˈ\(\upgamma \)ramata

S

0.483

0.091

0.462

59.002

male

kaˈ\(\uptheta \)os ˈ\(\updelta \)ʝavaze ta ˈ\(\upgamma \)ramata/

O

0.374

No

0.608

51.095

male

kaˈ\(\uptheta \)os ˈpsekaze/ta ˈfila

S

0.546

0.062

0.367

48.533

male

kaˈ\(\uptheta \)os ˈpsekaze ta ˈfila/

O

0.434

No

0.524

73.272

male

kaˈ\(\uptheta \)os kseˈskonize /ta ˈrafça

S

0.745

No

0.633

50.708

male

kaˈ\(\uptheta \)os kseˈskonize ta ˈrafça/

O

0.607

No

0.482

53.276

male

kaˈ\(\uptheta \)os ˈepsine/ta kuˈlurʝa

S

0.475

No

0.535

48.649

male

kaˈ\(\uptheta \)os ˈepsine ta kuˈlurʝa/

O

0.314

No

0.574

55.468

male

kaˈ\(\uptheta \)os maˈʝireve/ta maˈkaroɲa

S

0.535

No

0.612

60.349

male

kaˈ\(\uptheta \)os maˈʝireve ta maˈkaroɲa/

O

0.438

No

0.679

47.838

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Martzoukou, M., Papadopoulou, D. & Kosmidis, MH. The Comprehension of Syntactic and Affective Prosody by Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder Without Accompanying Cognitive Deficits. J Psycholinguist Res 46, 1573–1595 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-017-9500-4

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