How do autistic adults use syntactic and prosodic cues to manage spoken discourse?

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Autism
• adults
• spoken discourse
• prosody
• syntax

Acknowledgments

We were able to conduct the present study thanks to the F.R.S.-FNRS Research Incentive Grant F.4502.15 to the last author and a Foundation Jean-François Peterbroeck doctoral grant to the first author. This generous support is acknowledged. We are also very grateful to all our participants who dedicated their time to our research.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare they have no competing interests.

Notes

¹ The description of the LOCAS-F composition comes from a talk given by Anne Catherine Simon at the conference ‘Journée d’étude Toulousaine’ in 2015.

² As Liesbeth Degand (p.c.) sensibly pointed out, the use of the term ‘silence-bound’ might be misleading because silence implies the absence of sound, whereas a silent pause implies an interruption of speech (or sound). However, it was equally misleading to use the term ‘intonation-bound’ since the BDUs were not mapped based on intonation features. Therefore, for clarity and practical reasons, we opted for the term ‘silence-bound’ to refer to BDUs in which several syntactic units are bound by one silent pause.

⁵ The unexpected lower counts of syntactic sequences, sub-units of dependency clauses, compared to the total count of syntactic units is due to the phenomenon of overlapping speech, which student assistants were instructed to code as % (not analyzed). In cases where only a small part of the dependency clause was overlapping, the dependency clause was still included in the analysis, but the overlapping sequence or sequences were coded as % (and hence not included in the final analysis).

³ The frequencies reported in tables 13 and 14 come from a talk given by Anne Catherine Simon at the conference ‘Journée d’étude Toulousaine’ in 2015.

⁴ We would like to thank one of Reviewers for highlighting this interesting possibility.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by Research Incentive F.R.S.-FNRS (grant F.4502.15), a Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles ARC-Consolidator grant ‘Context in Autism’, and the support of the Foundation Jean-François Peterbroeck.