TY - JOUR
T1 - Quantitative analysis of disfluency in children with autism spectrum disorder or language impairment
AU - MacFarlane, Heather
AU - Gorman, Kyle
AU - Ingham, Rosemary
AU - Hill, Alison Presmanes
AU - Papadakis, Katina
AU - Kiss, Géza
AU - Van Santen, Jan
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 MacFarlane et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2017/3
Y1 - 2017/3
N2 - Deficits in social communication, particularly pragmatic language, are characteristic of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Speech disfluencies may serve pragmatic functions such as cueing speaking problems. Previous studies have found that speakers with ASD differ from typically developing (TD) speakers in the types and patterns of disfluencies they produce, but fail to provide sufficiently detailed characterizations of the methods used to categorize and quantify disfluency, making cross-study comparison difficult. In this study we propose a simple schema for classifying major disfluency types, and use this schema in an exploratory analysis of differences in disfluency rates and patterns among children with ASD compared to TD and language impaired (SLI) groups. 115 children ages 4±8 participated in the study (ASD = 51; SLI = 20; TD = 44), completing a battery of experimental tasks and assessments. Measures of morphological and syntactic complexity, as well as word and disfluency counts, were derived from transcripts of the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS). High inter-annotator agreement was obtained with the use of the proposed schema. Analyses showed ASD children produced a higher ratio of content to filler disfluencies than TD children. Relative frequencies of repetitions, revisions, and false starts did not differ significantly between groups. TD children also produced more cued disfluencies than ASD children.
AB - Deficits in social communication, particularly pragmatic language, are characteristic of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Speech disfluencies may serve pragmatic functions such as cueing speaking problems. Previous studies have found that speakers with ASD differ from typically developing (TD) speakers in the types and patterns of disfluencies they produce, but fail to provide sufficiently detailed characterizations of the methods used to categorize and quantify disfluency, making cross-study comparison difficult. In this study we propose a simple schema for classifying major disfluency types, and use this schema in an exploratory analysis of differences in disfluency rates and patterns among children with ASD compared to TD and language impaired (SLI) groups. 115 children ages 4±8 participated in the study (ASD = 51; SLI = 20; TD = 44), completing a battery of experimental tasks and assessments. Measures of morphological and syntactic complexity, as well as word and disfluency counts, were derived from transcripts of the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS). High inter-annotator agreement was obtained with the use of the proposed schema. Analyses showed ASD children produced a higher ratio of content to filler disfluencies than TD children. Relative frequencies of repetitions, revisions, and false starts did not differ significantly between groups. TD children also produced more cued disfluencies than ASD children.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85015289602&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85015289602&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0173936
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0173936
M3 - Article
C2 - 28296973
AN - SCOPUS:85015289602
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 12
JO - PLoS One
JF - PLoS One
IS - 3
M1 - e0173936
ER -