Mandarin Disyllabic Word Imitation in Children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

Atypical pitch production and perception in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have been reported mainly from non-tonal language backgrounds. In tonal languages such as Mandarin, the changes of pitch not only signal prosody at a sentence level but also contrast word meanings known as tones at a lexical level. It remains unclear whether children with ASD from tonal language backgrounds show a deficit in the use of pitch at both levels. Therefore, the current study aims to exploit whether Mandarin-speaking children with ASD exhibit atypical lexical pitch production and whether their performance is influenced by semantic information in a disyllabic true and pseudo-words imitation task. Results from acoustic analysis demonstrated significant differences in pitch and duration measures between both subject groups and word types.