At the 2024 Meeting on Language in Autism (MoLA), Janna Guilfoyle (left, 6th year clinical psychology doctoral student) presented a poster titled, “Physiological mechanisms contributing to atypical pragmatics in autism: A study of neural speech perception and speech-motor articulation,” in which she demonstrates that both the fidelity of speech sound encoding and speech-motor articulatory skills are negatively impacted in ASD, interrelated, and contribute to downstream high-order conversational skills, including functional use of prosody.
Maureen Butler (right, 2nd year clinical psychology doctoral student) presented a project which investigated prosodic synchrony, or the subconscious synchronization of conversational partners’ use of pitch, voice quality, & rhythm in speech, among children and young adults with autism and typical development. Consistent with clinical observations that autistic individuals often experience difficulty with conversational volume and rate modulation, study results demonstrated reduced synchrony in variability in volume and rate predicted ASD diagnosis.
