Intonation in Hebrew-Speaking Children with High Functioning Autism

Abstract Atypical prosody has been identified as a core feature of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Even when other aspects of language improve, prosodic deficits tend to be persistent. Deficits in prosody may limit the social acceptance of children with High-Functioning Autism (HFA) mainstreamed into the larger community. Prosody in ASD is an underresearched and criticized area in general and there has been little research on the prosody of Israeli Hebrew (IH) and even fewer studies comparing the prosody of typical and atypical Hebrewspeaking children in particular. Our study compares and contrasts the intonation units (IU), simple pitch accents (PA), and edge tones (ET) of five children between 9 and 12 years of age diagnosed with HFA and five children without developmental disorders (WDD) in reading aloud and spontaneous speech elicitation tasks. The subjects were matched for age, year of school, and academic achievements and all were male monolingual speakers of IH. The data were transcribed using the Autosegmental-Metrical (AM) theory of intonation with the IH ToBI (Tones and Break Indices) system being developed for this study with the computerized PRAAT system. The results were analyzed and explained according to: (1) the defintion that language is a symbolic tool whose structure is shaped both by its communication function and by the characteristics of its users and (2) the principle that language represents a compromise in the struggle to achieve maximum communication through minimal effort associated with the theory of Phonology as Human Behavior (PHB). The children with HFA produced more IU and PA than the WDD children. The HFA children acquired a limited repertoire of prosodic-edgetone patterns within the norm of the language. These patterns were repeatedly used both in spontaneous speech and in the reading tasks. In contrast, the WWD control group used a greater number of prosodic patterns showing a larger degree of variation for the same speech and language tasks. This study has become the basis for further ongoing research which has shown clear parallels in the extralinguistic, paralinguistic (prosody), and linguistic (lexical repetition) behavior of HFA children.