Autistic youth who are minimally or low verbal underrepresented in research leaving little to no evidence base for supporting them and their families. To date, few studies have examined the types of words word combinations these individuals use. The purpose this study was take a strengths-based approach outline descriptive profiles autistic use elucidate lexical morphosyntactic features spoken language.We analyzed language samples from 49 ages 6-21 years used fewer than 200 words. Systematic...

Purpose: The current study examined the predictive role of gestures and gesture–speech combinations on later spoken language outcomes in minimally verbal (MV) autistic children enrolled a blended naturalistic developmental/behavioral intervention (Joint Attention, Symbolic Play, Engagement, Regulation [JASPER] + Enhanced Milieu Teaching [EMT]). Method: Participants were 50 MV (40 boys), ages 54–105 months ( M = 75.54, SD 16.45). was defined as producing fewer than 20 spontaneous, unique,...

Purpose: Conversational latency entails the temporal feature of turn-taking, which is understudied in autistic children. The current study investigated influences child-based and parental factors on conversational children with heterogeneous spoken language abilities. Method: Participants were 46 aged 4–7 years. We remotely collected 15-min naturalistic samples context parent–child interactions to characterize both child parent latency. was operationally defined as time it took for one...

Abstract Prior research supports the use of natural language sampling (NLS) to assess rate speech utterances (URate) and conversational turns (CTRate) in minimally verbal (MV) autistic children. Bypassing time‐consuming transcription, previous work demonstrated ability derive URate CTRate using real‐time coding methods provided support for their strong psychometric properties. (1) Unexplored is how capture change over time (2) whether specific child factors predict changes 50 MV children (40...

Natural language sampling (NLS) is a common methodology in research and clinical practice used to evaluate child's spontaneous spoken naturalistic context. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) complex neurodevelopmental condition that results heterogeneous profiles. NLS has emerged as useful method for better understanding use development this population. Prior work examined the effects contexts (e.g., home, lab) conversational partners examiner, parent) have on childrens production, but less...

Abstract Prior work examined how minimally verbal (MV) children with autism used their gestural communication during social interactions. However, interactions are exchanges between partners. Examining parent–child is critically important given the influence of parent responsivity on children's communicative development. Specifically, responses that semantically contingent to child's plays an role in further shaping language learning. This study examines whether MV autistic ( N = 47; 48–95...

The Ganong effect—more identifications of a certain phoneme in context where that would yield real word than pseudoword—has been widely replicated. Few studies, however, have tested whether this effect occurs for frequency contrasts. In the present study, participants' likelihood identifying an ambiguous sound as aspirated was acoustically identical continua contexts identification either lower- or higher-frequency unaspirated would. No frequency-based found.

Speech foundation models, trained on vast datasets, have opened unique opportunities in addressing challenging low-resource speech understanding, such as child speech. In this work, we explore the capabilities of models child-adult speaker diarization. We show that exemplary can achieve 39.5% and 62.3% relative reductions Diarization Error Rate Speaker Confusion Rate, respectively, compared to previous diarization methods. addition, benchmark evaluate results with varying input audio window...

Different emotional states introduce substantial acoustic variations in talkers’ voices. It remains unclear how within-talker variability across affects listeners' ability to maintain perceptual constancy during talker identification. Here, we investigated (1) changes state affected identification accuracy, (2) key features of voice acoustics, and (3) emotion-related these listeners’ performance. Forty-eight listeners learned identify talkers from speech expressing one (neutral, fearful, or...

Speech foundation models, trained on vast datasets, have opened unique opportunities in addressing challenging low-resource speech understanding, such as child speech. In this work, we explore the capabilities of models child-adult speaker diarization. We show that exemplary can achieve 39.5% and 62.3% relative reductions Diarization Error Rate Speaker Confusion Rate, respectively, compared to previous diarization methods. addition, benchmark evaluate results with varying input audio window...

Speech processing techniques are useful for analyzing speech and language development in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), who often varied delayed acquiring these skills. Early identification intervention crucial, but traditional assessment methodologies such as caregiver reports not adequate the requisite behavioral phenotyping. Natural Language Sample (NLS) analysis has gained attention a promising complement. Researchers have developed benchmarks spoken capabilities ASD,...