Phonetic entrainment of Cantonese-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD)

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) typically show less engagement in social interactions. Previous studies in verbal communication found that they are less able to entrain the phonetic features to their interlocutors, compared to their Typically Developing (TD) counterparts. In this study, we examined the phonetic adjustment of 15 Cantonese-speaking ASD children (mean age = 8.5 years, range = 6–10.8) and 9 Cantonese-speaking TD children (mean age = 7.9 years, range = 6.4–9.6) when using the designed sentences to answer questions raised by the same experimenter. There are three main findings: (1) ASD children tended to disentrain the minimum f0 from the experimenter while TD children showed consistent minimum f0 through the experiment, possibly because TD children noticed the convergence made by the experimenter; (2) TD children significantly entrained the intensity towards the experimenter, but no entrainment was found in ASD children; and (3) both groups demonstrated an increase of speech rate, catching up with the speech rate of the experimenter. Although children at this age range might not fully acquire entrainment skills, our results suggested that compared to TD children, ASD children started to show atypicality of phonetic adjustment in conversations. This study of Cantonese speakers makes cross-linguistic contribution to the literature of ASD children's language acquisition.