ACTE, Université libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium.
ULB Neuroscience Institute, Université libre de Bruxelles, Bruxelles, Belgium.
Clin Linguist Phon. 2021 Dec 2;35(12):1184-1209. doi: 10.1080/02699206.2021.1878278. Epub 2021 Feb 2.
Discourse studies investigating differences in the socio-communicative profiles of autistic (ASD) and neurotypical (NT) individuals have mostly relied on orthographic transcriptions, without taking prosodic information into account. However, atypical prosody is ubiquitous in ASD and a more accurate representation of their discourse abilities should also include prosodic cues. This exploratory study addresses this gap by segmenting the spoken discourse of 12 ASD and NT adults using the framework of Basic Discourse Units (BDUs). BDUs result from the mapping of syntactic boundaries on prosodic units, which can coincide in different ways and are associated with different discourse strategies. We hypothesized that the discourse of ASD adults would display more atypical strategies than NT adults, reflecting a 'pedantic' style and more difficulties in managing ongoing discourse. While ASD adults did not produce more discourse units associated with didactic or pedantic strategies than NT adults, they did produce less units associated with strategies of interactional regulation. This study provides initial evidence that multidimensional linguistic units, such as BDUs can help differentiate speech delivery strategies of ASD adults from those of their NT peers, even based on simple prosodic cues like silent pauses.
研究自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）和神经典型个体（NT）社会交际特征差异的话语研究大多依赖于正字法转录，而没有考虑韵律信息。然而，非典型韵律在 ASD 中普遍存在，更准确地描述他们的话语能力也应该包括韵律线索。本探索性研究通过使用基本话语单位（BDU）框架对 12 名 ASD 和 NT 成年人的口语话语进行分割，解决了这一差距。BDU 是通过将句法边界映射到韵律单位上得到的，这些韵律单位可以以不同的方式重合，并与不同的话语策略相关联。我们假设，与 NT 成年人相比，ASD 成年人的话语会表现出更多非典型的策略，反映出一种“学究式”的风格，以及在管理正在进行的话语方面更困难。虽然 ASD 成年人产生的与说教或学究策略相关的话语单位并不比 NT 成年人多，但他们产生的与互动调节策略相关的话语单位却更少。这项研究提供了初步证据，表明多维语言单位，如 BDU，可以帮助区分 ASD 成年人和他们的 NT 同龄人说话的策略，即使是基于简单的韵律线索，如无声停顿。
