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

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.