Abstract
The conclusions on prosodic pitch features in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have primarily been derived from studies in non-tonal language speakers. This cross-linguistic study evaluated the performance of imitating Cantonese lexical tones and their non-linguistic (nonspeech) counterparts by Cantonese- and Mandarin-speaking children with and without ASD. Acoustic analyses showed that, compared with typically developing peers, children with ASD exhibited increased pitch variations when imitating lexical tones, while performed similarly when imitating the nonspeech counterparts. Furthermore, Mandarin-speaking children with ASD failed to exploit the phonological knowledge of segments to improve the imitation accuracy of non-native lexical tones. These findings help clarify the speech-specific pitch processing atypicality and phonological processing deficit in tone-language-speaking children with ASD.
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This work was partly supported by grants from the National Social Science Foundation of China (18ZDA293), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, Hunan University (53111801066). We acknowledge Ms. Yicheng Rong for the assistance with data collection. We sincerely thank all the child participants and their parents for their participation and cooperation.
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FC and GP conceived and designed the study, participated in the statistical analysis, interpreted the data, and wrote the first draft of the manuscript; FC and CC collected the data. All authors contributed to and have approved the final manuscript.
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Chen, F., Cheung, C.CH. & Peng, G. Linguistic Tone and Non-Linguistic Pitch Imitation in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Cross-Linguistic Investigation. J Autism Dev Disord 52, 2325–2343 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-021-05123-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-021-05123-4