Focus-marking in a tonal language: Prosodic differences between Cantonese-speaking children with and without autism spectrum disorder.

ABSTRACT: Abnormal speech prosody has been widely reported in individuals with autism. Many studies on children and adults with autism spectrum disorder speaking a non-tonal language showed deficits in using prosodic cues to mark focus. However, focus marking by autistic children speaking a tonal language is rarely examined. Cantonese-speaking children may face additional difficulties because tonal languages require them to use prosodic cues to achieve multiple functions simultaneously such as lexical contrasting and focus marking. This study bridges this research gap by acoustically evaluating the use of Cantonese speech prosody to mark information structure by Cantonese-speaking children with and without autism spectrum disorder. We designed speech production tasks to elicit natural broad and narr

SUBMITTER: Chen S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11259269 | biostudies-literature | 2024

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature