Preston Ruh, “The Effects of the Autism Spectrum Quotient on Prosody and Segmental Perception”
Mentor: Hanyong Park, Linguistics
Poster #161

Past research has shown that neurotypical autistic traits are related to language processing such as sensitivity to segmental and prosodic information, as well as how the sex of the participant is impacted. The previous research has predominantly focused on either prosody or segmentation in isolation, while the present research bridges that gap as well as introduces a dimension of auditory perception. The goal of this study is to expand the literature on the impact of Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) scores on prosody and segmental perception. In this experiment, stimuli were generated by two native American-English speakers and presented to other native American-English listeners. The participants were given two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) identification tasks which had segmental and prosodic differences. For segmental 2AFC tasks, the participant chooses between two words distinguished by a voicing contrast in coda position. For prosodic 2AFC tasks, the participant would choose realizations of relative clauses, differentiated by attachment to near or far noun phrases. The results are yet to be actualized, but will likely follow the prior research about the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (IPH), which concerns itself with a bias towards one of the possible attachments during silent reading. When concerning heard sentences, this study researches whether different prosodic contours (i.e., intonation, stress, rhythm) are projected onto two different relative clause attachments and whether these contours affect syntactic ambiguity resolution in a similar manner to silent reading, which has a bias towards a low attachment. It is hypothesized that AQ scores will significantly impact the perception of both segments and prosody, mirroring trends observed in previous studies. We expect to see the AQ scores affecting the segmentation of sentences and words in similar manners as the previous research. The results will be used to better understand individual differences related to language perception and overall language processing.