| It has been shown that individuals with autism, including high-functioning (highly verbal) individuals, generally have impaired pragmatics, or social skills in the face in relatively intact lexicon and syntax (Menyuk and Quill 1984; Tager-Flusberg and Anderson 1991). They often face particular challenges in the areas of appropriate social interaction and in their ability to apply social information successfully (Bangel, Dennis and Prabhu 1998).; Certain prosodic contours, such as contrastive focus, are largely driven by pragmatics. Contrastive focus is used to separate an item from other items of the same category. If the child with autism is not aware of a disparity in knowledge between him/herself and the listener, then there is a definite possibility that he or she will not produce contrastive focus as required. By the same token, if the child with autism does not produce contrastive focus when required, does he or she recognize it when it's produced by someone else?; The goal of this dissertation was to determine to what degree high-functioning children with autism differ with respect to the use of linguistic prosody when compared with children with typical linguistic development. Based on phonetic experiments, this study investigated whether or not high-functioning children with autism are (1) able to recognize contrastive focus and (2) produce it consistently with or without a model.; The study includes two production experiments (Experiment 1: without a model of contrastive focus and Experiment 2: with a model) and one perception experiment (Experiment 3). For the production experiments, fundamental frequency (F0), duration and intensity were examined to determine whether the participants produced the contrastively focus. Perception results were analyzed to determine ability to interpret the specific meaning relayed by the presence of contrastive focus.; Results show that in general, the HFA individuals were better at the perception than production but the control group showed the opposite pattern. A greater number of HFA children demonstrated some success (above chance performance) on the perception task than did on the production task. The control group's performance surpassed that of the HFA group on the production tasks, but both groups performed similarly on the perception task. |
