Project III The proposed study will examine two components of social communication in speakers withautism: conversational pragmatics, especially as these are impacted by the presence of narrow interests;and production and perception of prosody. These skills will be examined in a cross-sectional design at twodevelopmental levels: preadolescence and adolescence, and will contrast performance among speakers atall points on the Autism Spectrum Disorder with typical development. The studies grow out of our on-goinginterest in social communication and its manifestation in people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) withhigh levels of intellectual and linguistic ability, but significant impairment in the capacity to achieve socialinteraction. Study 1 examines in depth the ability to produce appropriate speech acts in a structuredconversation, using a scripted, naturalistic interactive protocol that is designed to elicit specific speech actsand yields a quantitative measure of conversational skill. In addition to observing whether or not the targetspeech acts are produced, the protocol also uses a dynamic assessment format to provide a sequencedhierarchy of prompts, and rates the level of prompt needed to elicit acts that do not occur spontaneously. Anadditional aspect of the protocol is the assessment of impact of narrow interests on pragmatic performance.Performance on this protocol will be compared to a rating of pragmatic skills in an unstructured peerinteraction. This study has the potential to yield a standard quantitative, validated measure of pragmaticcompetence for use in clinical settings to evaluate pragmatic ability and measure change in treatment. Study2 extends our work on the role of prosody in social communication deficits in ASD. We propose to use anewly available measure of prosody, normed on typical children, to assess 3 levels of prosodic function --grammatical, pragmatic, and affective- in subjects with ASD. This study will also include fMRI work usingthe receptive prosody tasks. Patterns of prosodic production, and their change over the two developmentalperiods in the study, will also be examined, using both clinical and speech technology methods. These datawill be help to elucidate the relations between prosodic perception and production, identify prevalence andpatterns of prosodic deficits within ASD, and lead toward the development of intervention approaches toaddress these deficits.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 230 publications
