The Relationship Between Prosody and the Development of Conversational Turn-Taking in Infants at High and Low Risk of Autism Spectrum Disorder Public

Abstract

Prosody and social interaction are known to be two key elements of the developmental scaffold on which infants build language; however, there is little research exploring whether one element subserves the other or if they are inherently independent or interdependent. The goal of this study is to advance our understanding of early language development by investigating the influence of prosody on the timing of conversational turn-taking between infants at high and low risk of autism and their caregivers over the first fifteen months of life. We test the hypothesis that conversational turn-taking in infancy is stimulated by developmental changes in the intonation of caregiver infant-directed speech. Furthermore, we hypothesize that the derailment of synchronous conversational interactions in infants who go on to develop autism is a consequence of a receptive prosodic deficit present early in infancy. As part of an ongoing NIH Autism Center of Excellence program project, we collected day-long home recordings of 2 low-risk and 2 high-risk infants at 3, 6, 9, 12, and 15 months of age. We hand-coded each conversational interaction between primary caregiver and infant in the recordings. Final processing of the segments resulted in intonation contours derived from the original speech signal, event markers denoting the onset and offset of each utterance, and labels denoting the speaker of each utterance. Though the analysis did not find a statistically significant relationship between prosody and conversational interactions between risk groups across the first fifteen months of life, we fully expect that with greater power, the results will reach statistical significance. The present results do, however, establish a trajectory of conversational interactions expected in typical development and demonstrate a striking plateau in the high-risk infants' interactions. Furthermore, the results provide valuable information regarding the different ways in which caregivers of infants at high-risk of autism may respond when their child is not demonstrating a typical progression towards spoken language. This information will be of great use in developing specifically targeted clinical interventions.

Table of Contents

I. INTRODUCTION 1

Autism 1

Prosody 2

Infant-Directed Speech 3

Conversational Asymmetries 4

Timing and Contingency 5

The Current Study 5

II. METHOD 6

Participants 7

Diagnostic Assessments 7

Data Collection 9

Segmentation 10

Participant Group Matching 11

III. RESULTS 11

Case Study 11

Test of Main Hypotheses 13

IV. DISCUSSION 14

Clinical Implications 16

Future Directions 16

Conclusions 17

V. REFERENCES 18

VI. TABLES & FIGURES 22

VII. APPENDIX A 33

About this Honors Thesis

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School	Emory College
Department	Linguistics
Degree	BA
Submission	Honors Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Psychology, Clinical Language, Linguistics Psychology, Developmental
Mot-clé	infancy autism language acquisition timing prosody conversational turn-taking
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Ramsay, Gordon, Emory University
Committee Members	Rochat, Philippe, Emory University Nygaard, Lynne, Emory University

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