Abstract:
Objective: We aimed to investigate the perception of prosody in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), through the integration of behavioural and electrophysiological measures, by comparing a group of ASD individuals and control adults and children Methods: 15 adult controls, 15 child controls and 5 ASD children have participated in this study. The parents/caregivers of the child participants had to complete two standard questionnaires; a CCC-2 communication checklist, and CARS autism screening test. All participants underwent a brain activity recording task. Three speech stimuli, with various stress patterns, 0stress or equal stress, 1stress or stress on the 1st syllable, and 2stress or stress on the 2nd syllable, were used. Participants listened to the stimuli, while their ERPs were recorded. They also had to complete a PEPS-C test on a laptop which assessed their perception of receptive prosody. Results: Results indicated an overall pattern of differences between the amplitudes and latencies of the three participant groups. Maturational effects and the effect of stress patterns were also observed amongst the child groups, while adults had similar response patterns to various speech stimuli. The PEPS-C results showed lower average scores for ASD individuals, compared to the control participants. Significant correlations were revealed between several ERP measure and PEPS-C scores. Conclusion and significance: Abnormal patterns of prosody perception have been noted in this study, while they often correlated with specific scores on the PEPS-C behavioural measure. These findings may contribute to better understandings of language and prosody perception in the field of speech science.