Quantification of speech and synchrony in the conversation of adults with autism spectrum disorder

Keiko Ochi; Nobutaka Ono; Keiho Owada; Masaki Kojima; Miho Kuroda; Shigeki Sagayama; Hidenori Yamasue

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0225377

Quantification of speech and synchrony in the conversation of adults with autism spectrum disorder

PLoS One. 2019 Dec 5;14(12):e0225377. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0225377. eCollection 2019.

Authors

Keiko Ochi¹, Nobutaka Ono², Keiho Owada³, Masaki Kojima³, Miho Kuroda³, Shigeki Sagayama⁴, Hidenori Yamasue⁵

Affiliations

¹ School of Media Science, Tokyo University of Technology, Hachioji, Japan.
² Department of Computer Science, Graduate School of Systems Design, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Hino, Japan.
³ Department of Child Psychiatry, School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.
⁴ University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.
⁵ Department of Psychiatry, Hamamatsu University School of Medicine, Hamamatsu, Japan.

Abstract

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a highly prevalent neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impairments in social reciprocity and communication together with restricted interest and stereotyped behaviors. The Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) is considered a 'gold standard' instrument for diagnosis of ASD and mainly depends on subjective assessments made by trained clinicians. To develop a quantitative and objective surrogate marker for ASD symptoms, we investigated speech features including F0, speech rate, speaking time, and turn-taking gaps, extracted from footage recorded during a semi-structured socially interactive situation from ADOS. We calculated not only the statistic values in a whole session of the ADOS activity but also conducted a block analysis, computing the statistical values of the prosodic features in each 8s sliding window. The block analysis identified whether participants changed volume or pitch according to the flow of the conversation. We also measured the synchrony between the participant and the ADOS administrator. Participants with high-functioning ASD showed significantly longer turn-taking gaps and a greater proportion of pause time, less variability and less synchronous changes in blockwise mean of intensity compared with those with typical development (TD) (p<0.05 corrected). In addition, the ASD group had significantly wider distribution than the TD group in the within-participant variability of blockwise mean of log F0 (p<0.05 corrected). The clinical diagnosis could be discriminated using the speech features with 89% accuracy. The features of turn-taking and pausing were significantly correlated with deficits of ASD in reciprocity (p<0.05 corrected). Additionally, regression analysis provided 1.35 of mean absolute error in the prediction of deficits in reciprocity, to which the synchrony of intensity especially contributed. The findings suggest that considering variance of speech features, interaction and synchrony with conversation partner are critical to characterize atypical features in the conversation of people with ASD.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Adult
Autism Spectrum Disorder / psychology*
Communication*
Humans
Interpersonal Relations*
Male
Social Class
Speech / physiology*
Young Adult

Grants and funding

Neither the funder nor sponsor, the Strategic Research Program for Brain Sciences from the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development (JP18dm0107134 to HY), had any involvement in the data collection, analyses, writing, or interpretation of the study. This work was also partially supported by a JSPS KAKENHI Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A) (Grant Number: 16H01735 to NO).