Rhythmic motor entrainment in Cantonese autism

Abstract

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) individuals are often perceived as socially awkward due to prosody impairment. Impaired rhythm entrainment ability resulting from temporal processing inability may lead to disruption of their speech rhythm. Hence, this study aimed to investigate whether ASD individuals can complete speech cycling task and demonstrate comparable patterns with neurotypical adults, and the relationship between their performance in the speech cycling task and a simple tapping task. Ten neurotypical and Ten ASD native Cantonese speakers completed the following tasks: (1) Speech cycling task: To repeatedly produce sentences under five different tempi (2) Tapping task: To produce drum beats that align with the given tempi. Participants were able to complete both tasks. ASD participants exhibited loosely similar speech rhythm pattern as the NT group, but were significantly more inaccurate in rhythm entrainment and had larger variability of performance in both tasks. To conclude, ASD individuals demonstrated impaired rhythm entrainment ability in terms of both speech-related and non-speech tasks, which is possibly due to their impaired temporal processing ability. Such impairment may also hinder their daily social interaction. The result may contribute to further understanding in prosody related treatment design in ASD population for clinical purpose.