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Individuals with autism spectrum disorder are impaired in absolute but not relative pitch and duration matching in speech and song imitation

Wang, L., Pfordresher, P. Q., Jiang, C. and Liu, F. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7776-0222 (2021) Individuals with autism spectrum disorder are impaired in absolute but not relative pitch and duration matching in speech and song imitation. Autism Research, 14 (11). pp. 2355-2372. ISSN 1939-3806

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To link to this item DOI: 10.1002/aur.2569

Abstract/Summary

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often exhibit atypical imitation. However, few studies have identified clear quantitative characteristics of vocal imitation in ASD. This study investigated imitation of speech and song in English-speaking individuals with and without ASD and its modulation by age. Participants consisted of 25 autistic children and 19 autistic adults, who were compared to 25 children and 19 adults with typical development matched on age, gender, musical training, and cognitive abilities. The task required participants to imitate speech and song stimuli with varying pitch and duration patterns. Acoustic analyses of the imitation performance suggested that individuals with ASD were worse than controls on absolute pitch and duration matching for both speech and song imitation, although they performed as well as controls on relative pitch and duration matching. Furthermore, the two groups produced similar numbers of pitch contour errors, pitch interval errors and time errors. Across both groups, sung pitch was imitated more accurately than spoken pitch, whereas spoken duration was imitated more accurately than sung duration. Whereas children imitated spoken pitch more accurately than adults when it came to speech stimuli, age showed no significant relationship to song imitation. These results reveal a vocal imitation deficit across speech and music domains in ASD that is specific to absolute pitch and duration matching. This finding provides evidence for shared mechanisms between speech and song imitation, which involves independent implementation of relative versus absolute features.

Item Type:Article
Refereed:Yes
Divisions:Interdisciplinary Research Centres (IDRCs) > Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Neurodynamics (CINN)
Interdisciplinary centres and themes > ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorders) Research Network
Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Department of Psychology
Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Language and Cognition
ID Code:98886
Publisher:John Wiley

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