Conversational Correlates of Prosodic Entrainment in Youth with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

Research on prosodic entrainment has shown correlations between the degree of prosodic entrainment and several dimensions of conversational success. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often encounter difficulties with a variety of skills necessary for conversational success, especially with the social dimensions of conversational behavior. The goal of the current study was to investigate whether children and teens with an autism diagnosis show similar correlations between prosodic entrainment in mean fundamental frequency ( f0 ) on the one hand and conversational effectiveness, duration of conversations, and conversational turn-taking behavior on the other hand when compared to their neurotypical peers.We found significant interaction effects by group between mean f0 entrainment and all three conversational measures. However, we found no significant differences in group means in the three investigated conversational measures of conversational effectiveness, the number of conversational turns, and duration of conversations for speakers in each group. These results suggest that even though speakers with ASD may show surface conversational behaviors similar to their neurotypical peers, the prosodic manifestation of conversational speech clearly marks conversation partners with ASD as different from their age and gender matched peers.