Maggie Rose Pelella


2022

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Identifying stable speech-language markers of autism in children: Preliminary evidence from a longitudinal telephony-based study
Sunghye Cho | Riccardo Fusaroli | Maggie Rose Pelella | Kimberly Tena | Azia Knox | Aili Hauptmann | Maxine Covello | Alison Russell | Judith Miller | Alison Hulink | Jennifer Uzokwe | Kevin Walker | James Fiumara | Juhi Pandey | Christopher Chatham | Christopher Cieri | Robert Schultz | Mark Liberman | Julia Parish-morris
Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology

This study examined differences in linguistic features produced by autistic and neurotypical (NT) children during brief picture descriptions, and assessed feature stability over time. Weekly speech samples from well-characterized participants were collected using a telephony system designed to improve access for geographically isolated and historically marginalized communities. Results showed stable group differences in certain acoustic features, some of which may potentially serve as key outcome measures in future treatment studies. These results highlight the importance of eliciting semi-structured speech samples in a variety of contexts over time, and adds to a growing body of research showing that fine-grained naturalistic communication features hold promise for intervention research.