Studies of Prosody...Autistic Spectrum Disorders

描述（由申请人提供）：提议的项目将提供50%的工资支持，为期5年，使申请人从南康涅狄格州立大学的教学和其他教职工作中释放出来，允许她从事一系列以患者为导向的研究，并指导耶鲁儿童研究中心的初级语言临床医生。该候选人是一位多产的研究者（在权威期刊上发表了60篇论文），在过去的16年里，他一直在州立大学任教，教学负担沉重。该奖项将为她提供在以患者为导向的临床研究环境中从事重点研究和指导活动的机会。耶鲁儿童研究中心在自闭症儿童的研究和临床护理方面已经活跃了20多年。该中心既提供了研究对象的来源，也提供了一个多学科诊所，为大量这些儿童及其家庭提供服务，并提供了与来自不同背景的科学家合作的机会。候选人在这个项目中的长期目标是：1)增加她在三个特定合作者提出的领域的知识和技能-工具语音分析和信号检测，神经成像和机器人技术；2)将更多的时间和精力投入到以患者为导向的研究和临床指导上。这里提出的研究生涯发展计划将使候选人有最大的机会为自闭症沟通障碍领域的知识和实践做出贡献。该项目的研究计划包括三项研究：1)研究高功能自闭症谱系障碍（asd）患者在语法和语用/情感语境下的韵律产生，以及适当的对照组，使用仪器分析和信号检测方法，以更好地详细描述韵律能力，并努力制定韵律干预方案；2)研究高功能自闭症患者和相应的对照组在语法和语用/情感语境下的韵律感知，以更好地描述他们的能力，并为未来韵律神经组织的研究提供一种可通过功能磁共振成像测试的方案，并研究典型受试者和自闭症患者在韵律处理策略上的差异；3)开发具有机器人泛化训练阶段的韵律干预程序，并与传统干预程序进行测试。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The proposed project will provide 50% salary support for five years to release the applicant from teaching and other faculty responsibilities at Southern Connecticut State University and allow her to work on a series of patient-oriented research studies and to mentor beginning speech-language clinicians at the Yale Child Study Center. The candidate is a productive researcher (60 papers in refereed journals) who has, for the past 16 years, been teaching at state universities with heavy teaching loads. This award would provide her with the opportunity to engage in focused research and mentoring activities in a patient-oriented clinical research environment. The Yale Child Study Center has been active in both research and clinical care of children with autism for more than 20 years. The Center provides both a source of subjects for research and a multidisciplinary clinic that serves large numbers of these children and their families, as well as the opportunities for collaborations with scientists from a broad range of backgrounds. The candidate's long-term goals in this project are: 1) to increase her knowledge and skills in three areas in which specific collaborators have been proposed--instrumental speech analysis and signal detection, neuroimaging, and robotics; and 2) to devote more time and attention to patient-oriented research and clinical mentoring. The research career development plan proposed here will result in maximizing the candidate's opportunity to contribute to knowledge and practice in the field of communication disorders in autism. The research plan for this project involves three studies: 1) the study of the production of prosody in grammatical and pragmatic/affective contexts in high functioning individuals with autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs) and appropriate contrast groups, using instrumental analysis and signal detection methodologies, both to better detail prosodic abilities and to work toward the development of a prosodic intervention protocol; 2) the study of the perception of prosody in grammatical and pragmatic/affective contexts in high functioning individuals with ASDs and appropriate contrast groups, both to better detail their abilities and to work toward the development of a protocol that can be tested via functional magnetic resonance imaging for future studies of the neural organization of prosody and to investigate differences in processing strategies between typical subjects and those with ASDS; and 3) the development of a prosodic intervention program with a robotic generalization training phase, to be tested against a traditional intervention program.