Abstract: As a basic perceptual attribute of sound and a key information carrier in both music and language, pitch plays a crucial role in the perception of speech and music. Nevertheless, individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) tend to exhibit atypical pitch perception. While previous studies have noted slightly enhanced ability in autistic individuals’ overall performance in nonspeech pitch perception, the perception of speech pitch, which is crucial for encoding lexical differences in tone languages such as Mandarin, remains unclear. Additionally, multiple studies have suggested that individuals with ASD suffer from abnormal auditory attention, potentially impacting their speech pitch perception negatively. The present study aimed to investigate the tone perception in Mandarin-speaking children with autism and identify whether attention shifting in individuals with ASD may exert an influence on tone perception. By means of two picture-matching tasks, the experiment assessed the lexical tone perception and comprehension of Mandarin-speaking children with ASD and typically developing (TD) controls, matched on age and nonverbal IQ. The results indicate a clear distinction between tone perception of children with ASD and TD controls. Besides, because of different patterns of attentional focus, difference in task types has certain effects on tone perception.
原载Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2024