Speech and Prosody Characteristics of Adolescents and Adults With High-Functioning Autism and Asperger Syndrome

Speech and prosody-voice profiles for 15 male speakers with High-Functioning Autism (HFA) and 15 male speakers with Asperger syndrome (AS) were compared to one another and to profiles for 53 typically developing male speakers in the same 10- to 50-years age range. Compared to the typically developing speakers, significantly more participants in both the HFA and AS groups had residual articulation distortion errors, uncodable utterances due to discourse constraints, and utterances coded as inappropriate in the domains of phrasing, stress, and resonance. Speakers with AS were significantly more voluble than speakers with HFA, but otherwise there were few statistically significant differences between the two groups of speakers with pervasive developmental disorders. Discussion focuses on perceptual-motor and social sources of differences in the prosody-voice findings for individuals with Pervasive Developmental Disorders as compared with findings for typical speakers, including comment on the grammatical, pragmatic, and affective aspects of prosody

A diagnostic marker for speech delay associated with otitis media with effusion: the intelligibility-speech gap.

Abstract A companion paper in this issue reported diagnostic accuracy findings for a marker (the Intelligibility-Speech Gap) to identify speech delay associated with otitis media with effusion (SD-OME). The present paper reports findings for another possible diagnostic marker for SD-OME-Backing of Obstruents. Conversational speech samples and citation forms from 48 speech-delayed children with positive and negative histories for OME were analysed using both perceptual and acoustic methods. The perceptual findings indicated significant trends for backing to be more prevalent in children with positive compared to negative histories of OME. Among a number of candidate speech error variables, lowered first spectral moments on lingual stops and sibilant fricatives as obtained from moments analysis emerged as a promising acoustic correlate of backing. Positive and negative predictive values, and sensitivity and specificity values for the acoustic marker, were above 75% for each of three stimulus words targeting /k/, /z/ and /b/. Discussion considers alternative explanatory perspectives on the ontogenetic development of backing in children who have experienced the fluctuant hearing loss associated with early recurrent OME

Transitioning from analog to digital audio recording in childhood speech sound disorders

Few empirical findings or technical guidelines are available on the current transition from analog to digital audio recording in childhood speech sound disorders. Of particular concern in the present context was whether a transition from analog- to digital-based transcription and coding of prosody and voice features might require re-standardizing a reference database for research in childhood speech sound disorders. Two research transcribers with different levels of experience glossed, transcribed, and prosody-voice coded conversational speech samples from eight children with mild to severe speech disorders of unknown origin. The samples were recorded, stored, and played back using representative analog and digital audio systems. Effect sizes calculated for an array of analog versus digital comparisons ranged from negligible to medium, with a trend for participants’ speech competency scores to be slightly lower for samples obtained and transcribed using the digital system. We discuss the implications of these and other findings for research and clinical practice