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Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research

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2012

Sacred Heart University

Communication Disorders Faculty Publications

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Education

Neural Underpinnings Of Prosody In Autism, Inge-Marie Eigsti, Jillian Schuh, Einar Mencl, Robert T. Schultz, Rhea Paul Nov 2012

Neural Underpinnings Of Prosody In Autism, Inge-Marie Eigsti, Jillian Schuh, Einar Mencl, Robert T. Schultz, Rhea Paul

Communication Disorders Faculty Publications

This study examines the processing of prosodic cues to linguistic structure and to affect, drawing on fMRI and behavioral data from 16 high-functioning adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and 11 typically developing controls. Stimuli were carefully matched on pitch, intensity, and duration, while varying systematically in conditions of affective prosody (angry versus neutral speech) and grammatical prosody (questions versus statement). To avoid conscious attention to prosody, which normalizes responses in young people with ASD, the implicit comprehension task directed attention to semantic aspects of the stimuli. Results showed that when perceiving prosodic cues, both affective and grammatical, activation of …


Sensitivity To Probabilistic Orthographic Cues To Lexical Stress In Adolescent Speakers With Autism Spectrum Disorder And Typical Peers, Joanne Arciuli, Rhea Paul Jan 2012

Sensitivity To Probabilistic Orthographic Cues To Lexical Stress In Adolescent Speakers With Autism Spectrum Disorder And Typical Peers, Joanne Arciuli, Rhea Paul

Communication Disorders Faculty Publications

Lexical stress refers to the opposition of strong and weak syllables within polysyllabic words and is a core feature of the English prosodic system. There are probabilistic cues to lexical stress present in English orthography. For example, most disyllabic English words ending with the letters “-ure” have first-syllable stress (e.g., “pasture”, but note words such as “endure”), whereas most ending with “-ose” have second-syllable stress (e.g., “propose”, but note examples such as “glucose”). Adult native speakers of English are sensitive to these probabilities during silent reading. During testing, they tend to assign first-syllable stress when reading a nonword such as …