Atypical pitch production and perception in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have been reported mainly from non-tonal language backgrounds. In tonal languages such as Mandarin, the changes of pitch not only signal prosody at a sentence level but also contrast word meanings known as tones at a lexical level. It remains unclear whether children with ASD from tonal language backgrounds show a deficit in the use of pitch at both levels. Therefore, the current study aims to exploit whether Mandarin-speaking children with ASD exhibit atypical lexical pitch production and whether their performance is influenced by semantic information in a disyllabic true and pseudo-words imitation task. Results from acoustic analysis demonstrated significant differences in pitch and duration measures between both subject groups and word types.
Cite as: Wang, T., Ding, H. (2022) Mandarin Disyllabic Word Imitation in Children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder. Proc. Speech Prosody 2022, 105-109, doi: 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2022-22
@inproceedings{wang22_speechprosody,
author={Ting Wang and Heng Ding},
title={{Mandarin Disyllabic Word Imitation in Children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder}},
year=2022,
booktitle={Proc. Speech Prosody 2022},
pages={105--109},
doi={10.21437/SpeechProsody.2022-22}
}