Prosody in children with autism 1 Running Head: PROSODY IN CHILDREN WITH AUTISM Receptive and Expressive Prosodic Ability in Children with High-Functioning Autism

Purpose: This study aimed to identify the nature and extent of receptive and expressive prosodic deficits in children with high-functioning autism (HFA). Method: 31 children with HFA, 72 typically developing controls matched on verbal mental age and 33 adults with normal speech completed the prosody assessment procedure, Profiling Elements of Prosodic Systems in Children (PEPS-C). Results: Children with HFA performed significantly less well than controls on eleven out of twelve prosody tasks (p < .005). Receptive prosodic skills showed a strong correlation (p < .01) with verbal mental age in both groups, and to a lesser extent to expressive prosodic skills. Receptive prosodic scores also correlated with expressive prosody scores, particularly in grammatical prosodic functions. Prosodic development in the HFA group appeared to be delayed in many aspects of prosody and deviant in some. Adults showed near-ceiling scores in all tasks. Conclusions: The study demonstrates that receptive and expressive prosodic skills are closely associated in HFA. Receptive prosodic skills would be an appropriate focus for clinical intervention and further investigation of prosody and the relationship between prosody and social skills is warranted. Prosody in children with autism 2 Receptive and Expressive Prosodic Ability in Children with High-Functioning Autism Introduction An association between autism and prosody has long been suspected because children with autism frequently have expressive prosody that is atypical and not like that found in other disorders (Baltaxe & Simmons, 1985; Fay & Schuler, 1980). If there is a link, then some aspect of autism may give rise to at least some aspects of prosodic disorder. By establishing whether there is an association, and, if so, the nature of the association, it may be possible to increase understanding of the nature of autism and ameliorate some of the aspects of impaired communication associated with it. Previous studies in this area (reviewed in McCann & Peppé, 2003) have focused on expressive prosody, while receptive skills have received little attention; the focus of this paper is on receptive as well as expressive prosodic skills and the relationship between them.