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Lexical stress contrastivity in Italian children with autism spectrum disorders: an exploratory acoustic study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 December 2019

Joanne ARCIULI Open the ORCID record for Joanne ARCIULI [Opens in a new window] ,
Lucia COLOMBO  and
Luca SURIAN
Joanne ARCIULI*
Affiliation:
University of Sydney, Australia
Lucia COLOMBO
Affiliation:
University of Padova, Italy
Luca SURIAN
Affiliation:
University of Trento, Italy
*
*Corresponding author. Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Sydney, PO Box 170, Lidcombe1825, Australia. E-mail: joanne.arciuli@sydney.edu.au
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Abstract

We investigated production of lexical stress in children with and without autism spectrum disorders (ASD), all monolingual Italian speakers. The mean age of the 16 autistic children was 5.73 years and the mean age of the 16 typically developing children was 4.65 years. Picture-naming targets were five trisyllabic words that began with a weak–strong pattern of lexical stress across the initial two syllables (WS: matita) and five trisyllabic words beginning with a strong–weak pattern (SW: gomito). Acoustic measures of the duration, fundamental frequency, and intensity of the first two vowels for correct word productions were used to calculate a normalised Pairwise Variability Index (PVI) for WS and SW words. Results of acoustic analyses indicated no statistically significant group differences in PVIs. Results should be interpreted in line with the exploratory nature of this study. We hope this study will encourage additional cross-linguistic studies of prosody in children's speech production.

Keywords

lexical stressacoustic analysisautismASDItalian
Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 47 , Issue 4 , July 2020 , pp. 870 - 880
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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