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Atypical speech prosody represents a crucial diagnostic feature of autism. Speech accommodation, a process of adapting to the speech characteristics of another talker, is a common phenomenon in typically developing (TD) adults. However, little is known regarding whether autistic children, who have atypical prosodic profiles and social communication skills, also spontaneously accommodate to others’ speech. Thirty 5-to-10-year-old autistic children and 30 age-matched TD children repeated sentences after two model talkers either speaking with their original pitch or with artificially raised pitch. Acoustic analysis revealed that only the autistic children displayed evidence of pitch accommodation. In a follow-up experiment, 25 TD children were explicitly asked to copy the voice of the talkers; here, they showed a similar degree of pitch accommodation to the autistic children. We discuss results in the context of developmental patterns of speech accommodation and suggest autistic children might be more likely to accommodate to pitch changes due to differences in their sensitivity to the communicative function of speech, and to the slightly less typical-sounding voice of the higher-pitch model talker. This research is sponsored by NIDCD (R21DC017576). |
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