Spontaneous-speech acoustic-prosodic features of children with autism and the interacting psychologist

Atypical prosody, often reported in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders, is described by a range of qualitative terms that reflect the eccentricities and variability among persons in the spectrum. We investigate various word-and phonetic-level features from spontaneous speech that may quantify the cues reflecting prosody. Furthermore, we introduce the importance of jointly modeling the psy-chologist’s vocal behavior in this dyadic interaction. We demonstrate that acoustic-prosodic features of both par-ticipants correlate with the children’s rated autism sever-ity. For increasing perceived atypicality, we find chil-dren’s prosodic features that suggest ‘monotonic ’ speech, variable volume, atypical voice quality, and slower rate of speech. Additionally, we find the psychologist’s features inform their perception of a child’s atypical behavior– e.g., the psychologist’s pitch slope and jitter are increas-ingly variable and their speech rate generally decreases. Index Terms: atypical prosody, autism spectrum disor-der, intonation, psychologist, voice quality, ADOS