Pragmatic and prosodic features in Autism Spectrum Disorder: analysis of the speech of school-aged children

Abstract

The paper aims to investigate pragmatics and prosody in Autism Spectrum Disorder, always impaired following the literature. A pilot study was conducted on a sample of semispontaneous speech of 9 children with ASD (8-12y), searching which parameters reflect their perceptive atypia. After an overview of the state of the art, we present a multilevel analysis of acoustic parameters, lexical features, and information structure. The variation of the F0 range together with intensity describes the prosodic trend of the sample along the axis of variation between very monotonous and strongly emphatic voice; atypical types of word-fragmentation emerge; a wider fragmentation leads to a telegraphic speech style alternatively to a drop-down list of utterances. Hence, inside the heterogeneity of the sample, a cluster of features emerge framing what is perceived as atypical in the prosody of ASD speech and the pragmatic level of discourse structure.