| Individuals with autism have well-documented impairments in expressive prosody. These deficits typically persist through adulthood and can have a significant negative impact on a range of communicative functions. Existing research has focused primarily on prosodic expression, with scant attention paid to comprehension. Putative deficits in prosody processing may answer questions about the etiology of communication impairments in autism. The current study examined prosody comprehension in four domains: (1) basic discrimination of prosodic patterns, (2) the use of prosodic information to determine sentence structure/meaning, (3) understanding affect in the voice, and (4) understanding cues to the structure of discourse. This study examined how individuals with autism integrate prosody with sentence structure and meaning, as well as their ability to process these information streams in isolation. Participants were 21 individuals with high-functioning autism (HFA) aged 11-19 years, and 22 typically developing control participants matched on age, Full Scale IQ, receptive language abilities, race, ethnicity, and gender composition. It was hypothesized that individuals with HFA would have specific difficulty integrating prosodic information with sentence content to make decisions about a speaker's intended meaning, affective state, and intent discourse. Overall, findings supported the idea that individuals with HFA have difficulty integrating prosody with other aspects of speech, despite performing similarly to controls on a task of basic prosody processing. In particular, individuals with HFA were less likely than controls to use prosodic cues to resolve syntactic ambiguities. Moreover, the HFA group exhibited some difficulty utilizing both the prosodic pattern and grammatical structure of an utterance to determine a speaker's intent in discourse. Contrary to predictions, there were no group differences in perceiving affect in the speaker's voice or in integrating prosody with sentence meaning to determine affective states, findings which are consistent with previous research indicating that these deficits disappear when individuals with HFA are matched on language abilities with a control group. These findings are discussed in the context of theories about the integration of prosody and speech in typical development and the role of prosody in understanding language deficits in HFA. |
