Perceptual Analysis by Adults of the Speech of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders, Down’s Syndrome, and Intellectual Disabilities

• Published in: Neuroscience and behavioral physiology Vol. 52; no. 4; pp. 582 - 590
• Main Authors: Lyakso, E. E., Frolova, O. V., Nikolaev, A. S., Grigorev, A. S.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 01.05.2022; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Auditory perception; Auditory system; Autism; Autistic children; Behavioral Sciences; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Biomedicine; Children; Down syndrome; Down's syndrome; Emotions; Intellectual disabilities; Motivation; Neurobiology; Neurosciences; Speech; Speech perception; children’s speech; experiment; perception analysis; age; sex
• ISSN: 0097-0549; 1573-899X
• DOI: 10.1007/s11055-022-01279-3

The human voice can convey subtle nuances of mood and condition which are captured by the auditory system and recognized on the basis of personal experience, the listener’s state, and the motivation of the speaker. Voice and speech impairments in children ad their different severities in different disorders allow us to formulate the question of what information can be extracted by adults listening to the speech of a child with atypical development. The aim of the present work was to assess the ability of adults to recognize information about children from their speech. The study used auditory perception experiments. A total of 685 listeners took part in the study, which used 40 test sequences including the speech of 260 children aged 4–16 years, developing typically and with atypical development in the form of autistic spectrum disorder, Down’s syndrome, and intellectual disabilities. On listening to samples of children’s speech, listeners were found to be able to recognize the children’s sex and their psychoneurological status correctly, but had difficulty determining the children’s emotional status and the lexical meaning of speech; age was poorly recognized, especially in children with atypical development. Correlations were found between adults’ ability to recognize sex, age, psychoneurological and emotional status correctly on the one hand and the organization of test sequences and listeners’ professional experience on the other.