Prosody and Pragmatics: How preadolescents with ASD take turns-at-talk during a cooperative goal-oriented task

Prosodic impairment in autism is widespread. It greatly affects the ability to interact, form relationships, and convey meaning. Yet, despite its prevalence, our understanding of its nature remains incomplete. This study investigates the prosody of six preadolescent children with Autism Spectrum Disorder when playing a cooperative video game with an adult. Utilising Conversation Analysis (CA), it examines twelve hours of data to explore how these children use and respond to prosodic devices for interactional purposes; specifically to manage conversational turns, create information boundaries, signal importance and express emotion. The study also examines the adult’s role in accommodating and interpreting the children’s prosody. Key findings suggest these children demonstrate competence in managing turns when signalling completion and competing for speakership using prosodic resources aligned with lexico-syntactic structure. They display understanding and competency in using prosody to create meaningful sentences as well as to highlight novel or important information. Moreover, these children produce canonical complaints-relevant designs to express frustration. However, the study reveals how these children have challenges with the articulatory and prosodic timing and coordination of their speech, leading to irregular rhythm and fragmented and dysfluent turns, particularly when using complex linguistic structures. The children appear aware of these difficulties but have problems in modifying and updating prosodic patterns. They tend to resort to less complex lexico-syntactic structures to facilitate progression in the talk. The adult accommodates these prosodic variations, intervening only when shared understanding breaks down. Overall, the children show competence and understanding of prosodic function. However, errors in the timing and coordination of phonetic and acoustic features, alongside linguistic limitations impact prosodic form, limiting communication effectiveness. These findings expand our understanding of the prosodic abilities of children with ASD. The study highlights the need for targeted interventions to address these prosodic challenges and improve communication outcomes for these children.