Assessment and Treatment of Prosody Behavior in Individuals with Level 1 Autism: A Review and Call for Research

Abstract

Differences in prosody behavior between individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and their typically developing peers have been considered a central feature of ASD since the earliest clinical descriptions of the disorder (e.g., Kanner, 1943/1973). Prosody includes pitch and volume among other dimensions of vocal-verbal behavior that discriminate responses of the listener; thus, people with ASD whose prosody has confusing or off-putting effects may have fewer social opportunities at work, at school, or in the community. The purpose of this review is to examine the state of the literature intervening on prosody with individuals with ASD and to provide recommendations for researchers who are interested in contributing to the scientific understanding of prosody.

Keywords: Autism; Conversation; Prosody; social skills.

Fig. 1

Spectrograms of prosodic contours for a neurotypical English-language speaker from Chiew and Kjelgaard (2017). Note. From “The Perception of Affective Prosody in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders and Typical Peers,” by J. Chiew and M. Kjelgaard, , Clinical Archives of Communication Disorders, 2(2), p.133. Chiew and Kjelgaard is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited