title: Sensitivity to probabilistic orthographic cues to lexical stress in adolescent speakers with autism spectrum disorder and typical peers.
abstract: Lexical stress refers to the opposition of strong and weak syllables within polysyllabic words and is a core feature of the English prosodic system. There are probabilistic cues to lexical stress present in English orthography. For example, most disyllabic English words ending with the letters "-ure" have first-syllable stress (e.g., "pasture", but note words such as "endure"), whereas most ending with "-ose" have second-syllable stress (e.g., "propose", but note examples such as "glucose"). Adult native speakers of English are sensitive to these probabilities during silent reading. During testing, they tend to assign first-syllable stress when reading a nonword such as "lenture" but second-syllable stress when reading "fostpose" (Arciuli & Cupples,  2006 ). Difficulties with prosody, including problems processing lexical stress, are a notable feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The current study investigated the ability of adolescents with ASD (13-17 years of age) to show this sensitivity compared with a group of typically developing peers. Results indicated reduced sensitivity to probabilistic cues to lexical stress in the group with ASD. The implications of these findings are discussed.
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia. joanne.arciuli@sydney.edu.au
authors.forename: Joanne
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Arciuli
authors.forename: Rhea
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Paul
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D002648:Child; D002659:Child Development Disorders, Pervasive / Q000150:complications*; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011336:Probability; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D013315:Stress, Psychological / Q000150:complications*; D014825:Vocabulary