Variations in prosody convey lexical, grammatical, and pragmatic meaning, all essential for successful communication. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show deficits in communication and pragmatic use of language, with mixed results for how stress, intonation, and phrasing distinctions are employed. This study was designed to elucidate the prosodic abilities of minimally verbal school-aged children with ASD, a previously understudied population, in an effort to better understand communication abilities across the autism spectrum. Our goal is to acoustically analyze spontaneous speech productions to better identify and understand natural prosodic features. Average F0 was extracted from successive 250-ms time windows resulting in the dependent variables of average pitch and pitch range. Substantial variation was observed across participants, and an emergent pattern shows a correlation between F0 and language impairment severity. This first exploration into the pitch patterns of this population provides further insight into how prosody varies along the autism spectrum.
