Quantitative Analysis of Pitch in Speech of Children with Neurodevelopmental Disorders

We analyzed the prosody of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, Developmental Language Disorder, and typical development in conversational speech, using the CSLU ADOS speech corpus. We found several significant differences in the pitch characteristics of these diagnostic groups, and report automatic classification utilizing these features that are well above chance level. We show that the choice of pitch tracker, its parameters, and the pitch correction method can substantially affect the results, thus the scientific relevance of studies on prosody, and may be one of the reasons for conflicting findings.