Studies of Prosody...Autistic Spectrum Disorders

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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.