Lay Listener Classification and Evaluation of Typical and Atypical Children's Speech.
Melissa A Redford, Vsevolod Kapatsinski, Jolynn Cornell-Fabiano
PMID 28752796WHAT IT FOUND
Lay listeners rated children with autism as less likeable and more disordered based solely on short speech samples.
This negative social evaluation was driven by perceived intelligibility issues, such as slow rate and unclear articulation, rather than by prosodic differences alone.
Key findings
01Listeners judged speech from children with ASD as more disordered than speech from typically developing children, but only when hearing the full, unfiltered audio.
02Children with ASD were rated as significantly less likeable than typically developing children based on their unaltered speech samples.
03Perceived intelligibility, driven by articulation rate and clarity, was the strongest predictor of both judgments of disorder and negative social evaluations.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study used short, decontextualized speech samples, which may have prevented listeners from detecting prosodic errors that rely on linguistic context. The children with ASD were specifically selected by SLPs for having unusual prosody, so findings may not generalize to the broader ASD population. Listeners were young adults, not necessarily peers of the children, which may affect the ecological validity of the social evaluations.
Declared interests
None reported.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that prosody is unimportant in ASD. The study found that listeners could not detect group differences when prosody was isolated, suggesting that intelligibility and motor speech factors drive immediate social judgments, but this does not negate the social impact of prosodic deficits in natural, contextual conversation.