The Effects of Gender and Autism Spectrum Disorder on Prosody

To date, surprisingly little research has investigated how people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) use prosody, and no research has investigated whether there are gender differences in ASD prosody. To address these gaps in the literature, we studied the functional use of prosody in 116 native English-speaking college students, 25 of whom had ASD and 91 of whom did not. Participants were tested on their ability to comprehend and produce affective prosody, question/declarative intonation, phrase boundaries, lexical stress, phrase stress, and contrastive stress. Bayesian ANOVAs revealed that women generally outperformed men, particularly in prosody production. Participants who did and did not have ASD generally performed similarly on most subtests, a finding that likely reflects that the participants with ASD were college students with no history of written or spoken language impairments. The one subtest where participants with ASD performed substantially worse than those without ASD was the contrastive stress production subtest, which is the only production subtest that specifically taps discourse pragmatics. On this test, women who did and did not have ASD performed similarly, whereas men with ASD performed substantially worse than men who did not have ASD. Previous studies have shown that people with ASD sometimes use camouflaging techniques to hide their ASD symptoms in public, and that women with ASD camouflage their behavior more than men with ASD. We believe that, taken as a whole, our findings provide the first evidence of gender differences in prosodic camouflaging in ASD.