This research proposal is designed to study prosody in autistic children s utterances to test for a relationship between impaired pragmatic language and impaired use of prosody. Prosody refers to the suprasgmental information in speech, including variations in pitch, amplitude and relative durations of sound and silence. This study will collect and analyze a database of speech samples elicited from children with autism, children with specific language impairment (SLI) and normally-developing children. Children will be asked to describe silent video presentations and answer questions regarding the video content. Specific tests of differences in the tonal structure (pitch) and metrical structure (durations) of prosody related to lexical, syntactic and pragmatic structure among these children will be performed. Autistic children are predicted to be relatively impaired in prosody related to pragmatics, but spared in prosody related to work and syntax, whereas SLI children are predicted to be relatively impaired in prosody related to words and syntax, but spared in prosody related to pragmatics. Finally, listener acceptability judgments of prosody will be compared to determine the aspects of prosody related to the clinical impression that prosody is unusual in autism. These analyses will provide insight to the diagnosis and remediation of autism and SLI as well as inform theories of normal language development.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (NICHD)
Type
Postdoctoral Individual National Research Service Award (F32)
Project #
1F32HD008494-01
Application #
2767179
Study Section
Special Emphasis Panel (ZRG1-CMS (01))
Program Officer
Hanson, James W
Project Start
1999-06-15
Project End
Budget Start
1999-01-03
Budget End
1999-08-28
Support Year
1
Fiscal Year
1999
Total Cost
Indirect Cost
Name
University of Massachusetts Boston
Department
Psychology
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
City
Boston
State
MA
Country
United States
Zip Code
02125
Kjelgaard, Margaret M; Tager-Flusberg, Helen (2001) An Investigation of Language Impairment in Autism: Implications for Genetic Subgroups. Lang Cogn Process 16:287-308