Talk by Daniel Pape, McMaster University, Hamilton (Canada)

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Examining structured variation: The effects of ASD on spoken speech communication 

Abstract: This talk presents results from two recent experiments that examines how autistic-like character trait differences (ASD) influence high-level and low-level speech production and speech perception. The first experiment examined (prosodic) focus differences, for example for the sentence: “Who gave Mary the cake? John gave Mary the cake”. We examined how ASD trait differences would mediate the weighting of the different available acoustic cues, and whether the cues and their weighting differs comparing speech production to speech perception. In a second experiment we combined behavioural with EEG methods to examine how ASD influences perceptual coarticulation effects (i.e. the influence of neighbouring segments).