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. 2008 Aug;106(2):144-52.
doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2008.04.002. Epub 2008 May 27.

Resolving ambiguity: a psycholinguistic approach to understanding prosody processing in high-functioning autism

Joshua J Diehl  1 , Loisa Bennetto, Duane Watson, Christine Gunlogson, Joyce McDonough
Affiliations

Resolving ambiguity: a psycholinguistic approach to understanding prosody processing in high-functioning autism

Joshua J Diehl et al. Brain Lang. 2008 Aug.

Abstract

Individuals with autism exhibit significant impairments in prosody production, yet there is a paucity of research on prosody comprehension in this population. The current study adapted a psycholinguistic paradigm to examine whether individuals with autism are able to use prosody to resolve syntactically ambiguous sentences. Participants were 21 adolescents with high-functioning autism (HFA), and 22 typically developing controls matched on age, IQ, receptive language, and gender. The HFA group was significantly less likely to use prosody to disambiguate syntax, but scored comparably to controls when syntax alone or both prosody and syntax indicated the correct response. These findings indicate that adolescents with HFA have difficulty using prosody to disambiguate syntax in comparison to typically developing controls, even when matched on chronological age, IQ, and receptive language. The implications of these findings for how individuals with autism process language are discussed.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Syntactic Ambiguity Task Layout. Note. In this task, participants were given the above instructions to move a toy animal (e.g., dog; not pictured) around the board. The cat and the dog on the board represent flat animals that were velcroed to the board and could not be moved by the participants.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Group Performances on the Syntactic Ambiguity Task Note: Error bars represent the standard error of the mean (± SEM). *p<.05
Figure 3
Figure 3
Effect of Type of Prosodic Structure on Group Performance on Syntactic Ambiguity Task, Prosody Only Condition. Note: Error bars represent ± SEM.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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