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Rationale. Autism interventions commonly recommend that adults produce shortened and/or telegraphic (i.e., ungrammatical) utterances. We lack a clear understanding of the acoustic properties of simplified utterances and the pragmatic contexts in which they are used. This gap in knowledge prevents us from studying the effects of simplified input in an ecologically valid way. Here, we asked: what are the acoustic and pragmatic properties of simplified adult utterances used in autism intervention?
Methods. We analyzed audio samples from an online repository of naturalistic, developmental, behavioral intervention video clips. Using Praat, we examined telegraphic adult utterances and semantically related grammatical or single-word utterances.
Results. Most telegraphic utterances contained no distinct pauses. Findings suggested that adults lengthened content words to varying degrees regardless of utterance type. Adults used telegraphic utterances across pragmatic contexts—particularly when giving directives.
Conclusions. Understanding the acoustic and pragmatic properties of telegraphic utterances will maximize the ecological validity of studies designed to determine how simplified input affects language processing and word learning children on the autism spectrum.
Funding sources: NIH R21 DC016102 (Venker, PI); NIH R01 DC020165 (Venker, PI).
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