Department of Communicative Disorders and Deaf Education, Utah State University, Logan.
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2022 Apr 4;65(4):1416-1425. doi: 10.1044/2021_JSLHR-21-00490. Epub 2022 Mar 2.
According to the speech attunement framework, autistic individuals lack the ability and/or motivation to "tune up" their speech to the same level of precision as their neurotypical peers. However, previous studies exploring the articulatory patterns of autistic individuals have yielded disparate findings. One reason contrasting conclusions exist may be because studies have relied on perceptual measures of articulation. Here, we use an objective acoustic measure of articulatory precision to explore the articulatory patterns of autistic children and adults.
This was a retrospective analysis of an existing corpus of 900 recorded speech samples taken from 30 adult and 30 child participants across two different population groups: autistic individuals (autism spectrum disorder [ASD] group) and neurotypical individuals (neurotypical [NT] group). Articulatory precision scores were calculated using an automated metric that compares observed acoustics to the expected acoustics for each phoneme production. Linear mixed-effects models were used to compare the articulatory precision scores across population group (i.e., ASD group vs. NT group) and to see if these differences were moderated by age group (i.e., children vs. adult).
The speech of autistic individuals was characterized by reduced articulatory precision relative to their neurotypical peers. This pattern was not significantly moderated by age, indicating it occurred in both the children and adult groups.
Our preliminary findings indicate that imprecise articulation may be a characteristic of the speech of autistic individuals in both childhood and adulthood. These findings are in line with predictions posited by the speech attunement framework. Given the current lack of speech markers for this clinical population and the importance of speech quality in the social integration of autistic individuals, our results advance articulatory precision as a viable and important target for future research.
根据言语协调框架，自闭症个体缺乏将言语“协调”到与神经典型同龄人相同精确水平的能力和/或动机。然而，先前探索自闭症个体发音模式的研究得出了不同的发现。造成这种对比结论存在的一个原因可能是因为研究依赖于发音的感知测量。在这里，我们使用一种客观的发音精确性声学测量方法来探索自闭症儿童和成人的发音模式。
这是对现有语料库的回顾性分析，语料库包含了来自两个不同人群组的 30 名成人和 30 名儿童的 900 个记录语音样本：自闭症个体（自闭症谱系障碍 [ASD] 组）和神经典型个体（神经典型 [NT] 组）。使用一种自动度量标准来计算发音精确性分数，该标准将观察到的声学与每个音素产生的预期声学进行比较。线性混合效应模型用于比较人口组（即 ASD 组与 NT 组）之间的发音精确性分数，并观察这些差异是否受到年龄组（即儿童与成人）的调节。
与神经典型同龄人相比，自闭症个体的言语表现出发音精确性降低的特征。这种模式不受年龄的显著调节，这表明它发生在儿童组和成年组中。
我们的初步发现表明，发音不精确可能是自闭症个体在儿童期和成年期言语的特征。这些发现与言语协调框架提出的预测一致。鉴于目前缺乏针对该临床人群的言语标志物以及言语质量对自闭症个体社交融合的重要性，我们的结果将发音精确性作为未来研究的一个可行且重要的目标。
