The current study investigated whether the difficulty in finding group differences in prosody between speakers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and neurotypical (NT) speakers might be explained by identifying different acoustic profiles of speakers which, while still perceived as atypical, might be characterized by different acoustic qualities. We modelled the speech from a selection of speakers (N = 26), with and without ASD, as a network of nodes defined by acoustic features. We used a community-detection algorithm to identify clusters of speakers who were acoustically similar and compared these clusters with atypicality ratings by naïve and expert human raters. Results identified three clusters: one primarily composed of speakers with ASD, one of mostly NT speakers, and one comprised of an even mixture of ASD and NT speakers. The human raters were highly reliable at distinguishing speakers with and without ASD, regardless of which cluster the speaker was in. These results suggest that community-detection methods using a network approach may complement commonly-employed human ratings to improve our understanding of the intonation profiles in ASD.
To learn new words, particularly verbs, child learners have been shown to benefit from the linguistic contexts in which the words appear. However, cross-linguistic differences affect how this process unfolds. One previous study found that children's abilities to learn a new verb differed across Korean and English as a function of the sentence in which the verb occurred (Arunachalam et al., 2013). The authors hypothesized that the properties of word order and argument drop, which vary systematically in these two languages, were driving the differences. In the current study, we pursued this finding to ask if the difference persists later in development, or if children acquiring different languages come to appear more similar as their linguistic knowledge and learning capacities increase. Preschool-aged monolingual English learners (N = 80) and monolingual Korean learners (N = 64) were presented with novel verbs in contexts that varied in word order and argument drop and accompanying visual stimuli. We assessed their learning by measuring accuracy in a forced-choice pointing task, and we measured eye gaze during the learning phase as an indicator of the processes by which they mapped the novel verbs to meaning. Unlike previous studies which identified differences between English and Korean learning 2-year-olds in a similar task, our results revealed similarities between the two language groups with these older preschoolers. We interpret our results as evidence that over the course of early childhood, children become adept at learning from a larger variety of contexts, such that differences between learners of different languages are attenuated.
Shin and Mill (2021) propose four steps children go through when learning variable form use. Although I applaud Shin and Miller's focus on morphosyntactic variation, their accrual of evidence is post hoc and selective. Fortunately, Shin and Miller recognize this and encourage tests of their ideas. In support of their work, I share data from children with and without DLD within AAE and SWE to promote these child profiles and dialectal varieties in future studies.
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