Mechanisms of voice control related to prosody in autism spectrum disorder and first-degree relatives.
Shivani P Patel, Jason H Kim, Charles R Larson and 1 others
PMID 31187944WHAT IT FOUND
People with autism made larger voice corrections when their feedback pitch was shifted down or up.
Parents, especially those with autism-like social traits, showed similar patterns. Their voice feedback responses were atypical and related to prosody differences.
Key findings
01Individuals with autism produced larger voice corrections than controls when feedback pitch was shifted by 100 cents up or down.
02Parents of children with autism produced larger voice corrections than parent controls to 100-cent pitch shifts, and parents with broad autism phenotype traits showed the largest responses among parent groups.
03In the autism and control groups, larger voice corrections were associated with more restricted and repetitive behaviors and poorer prosodic imitation and lexical stress expression.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study did not test an intervention, so it cannot show that changing voice feedback control improves prosody. Only 9 participants with autism had EEG data, so the brainwave finding rests on a small subset. The autism group had lower full-scale IQ than controls, and the analysis did not include IQ as a covariate. The study did not measure pitch discrimination or auditory perceptual acuity, so larger voice responses might reflect hearing differences rather than feedback control. Three participants with autism were excluded from the speech task analysis because their intonation did not match the target question. Parent subgroup results were based on small groups and need replication in a larger sample.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest. The article metadata lists NIH and U.S. government research support.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that voice feedback training will improve prosody in autism. This was a lab study of responses to altered pitch feedback, and no treatment was tested.