From acoustics to grammar: Perceiving and interpreting grammatical prosody in adolescents with Asperger Syndrome

We report findings concerning the understanding of prosody in Asperger Syndrome (AS), a topic which has attracted little attention and led to contradictory results. Ability to understand grammatical prosody was tested in three novel experiments. Experiment 1 assessed the interpretation of word stress, Experiment 2 focused on grammatical pauses, and Experiment 3 tested the discrimination of the question contour. Acoustic tasks were also used to assess the perception of pitch, duration, intensity and prosodic contours. AS participants performed as well as typically developing controls in all our tasks. This provides support in favour of the view that grammatical prosody is spared in Asperger Syndrome.