To track the course of development in children's fine-grained perception of Mandarin tones, the present study explored how categorical perception (CP) of Mandarin tones emerges along age among 70 four- to seven-year-old children and 16 adults. Prominent discrimination peaks were found for both the child and the adult groups, and they were well aligned with the corresponding identification crossovers. Moreover, six-year-olds showed a much narrower width (i.e. a sharper slope) compared to younger children, and have already acquired adult-like identification competence of Mandarin high-level and mid-rising tones. Although the ability to discriminate within-category tone pairs did not change, the between-category discrimination accuracies were positively correlated with chronological ages among child participants. We assume that the perceptual refinement of Mandarin tones in young children may be driven by an accumulation of perceptual development from the tonal information of the ambient sound input.

The deficit in speech sound production in some children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) adds to their communication barriers. The 3-D virtual environments have been implemented to improve their communication abilities. However, there were no previous studies on the use of a 3-D virtual pronunciation tutor designed specifically to train pronunciation for children with ASD. To fill this research gap, the current study developed and evaluated a 3-D virtual tutor which served as a multimodal and real-data-driven speech production tutor to present both places and manners of Mandarin articulation. Using an eye-tracking technique (RED 5 Eye Tracker), Experiment 1 objectively investigated children’s gauged attention distribution online while learning with our computer-assisted 3-D virtual tutor in comparison to a real human face (HF) tutor. Eye-tracking results indicated most participants showed more interests in the visual speech cues of the 3-D tutor, and paid some degree of absolute attention to the additional visual speech information of both articulatory movements and airflow changes. To further compare treatment outcomes, training performance was evaluated in Experiment 2 with the ASD learners divided into two groups, with one group learning from the HF tutor and the other from the 3-D tutor (HF group vs. 3-D group). Both groups showed improvement with the help of computer-based training in the post-intervention test based on the calculation of a 5-point Likert scale. However, the 3-D group showed much higher gains in producing Mandarin stop and affricate consonants, and apical vowels. We conclude that our 3-D virtual imitation intervention system provides an effective approach of audiovisual pronunciation training for children with ASD.

Purpose: Previous studies have shown enhanced pitch and impaired time perception in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). However, it remains unclear whether such deviated patterns of auditory processing depending on acoustic dimensions would transfer to the higher level linguistic pitch and time processing. In this study, we compared the categorical perception (CP) of lexical tones and voice onset time (VOT) in Mandarin Chinese, which utilize pitch and time changes, respectively, to convey phonemic contrasts.Method: The data were collected from 22 Mandarin-speaking adolescents with ASD and 20 age-matched neurotypical controls. In addition to the identification and discrimination tasks to test CP performance, all the participants were evaluated with their language ability and phonological working memory. Linear mixed-effects models were constructed to evaluate the identification and discrimination scores across different groups and conditions.Results: The basic CP pattern of cross-boundary benefit when perceiving both native lexical tones and VOT was largely preserved in high-functioning adolescents with ASD. The degree of CP of lexical tones in ASD was similar to that in typical controls, whereas the degree of CP of VOT in ASD was greatly reduced. Furthermore, the degree of CP of lexical tones correlated with language ability and digit span in ASD participants.Conclusions: These findings suggest that the unbalanced acoustic processing capacities for pitch and time can be generalized to the higher level linguistic processing in ASD. Furthermore, the higher degree of CP of lexical tones correlated with better language ability in Mandarin-speaking individuals with ASD.

Purpose: It has been reported that tone language–speaking children with autism demonstrate speech-specific lexical tone processing difficulty, although they have intact or even better-than-normal processing of nonspeech/melodic pitch analogues. In this early efficacy study, we evaluated the therapeutic potential of Auditory-Motor Mapping Training (AMMT) in facilitating speech and word output for Mandarin-speaking nonverbal and low-verbal children with autism, in comparison with a matched non–AMMT-based control treatment.Method: Fifteen Mandarin-speaking nonverbal and low-verbal children with autism spectrum disorder participated and completed all the AMMT-based treatment sessions by intoning (singing) and tapping the target words delivered via an app, whereas another 15 participants received control treatment. Generalized linear mixed-effects models were created to evaluate speech production accuracy and word production intelligibility across different groups and conditions.Results: Results showed that the AMMT-based treatment provided a more effective training approach in accelerating the rate of speech (especially lexical tone) and word learning in the trained items. More importantly, the enhanced training efficacy on lexical tone acquisition remained at 2 weeks after therapy and generalized to untrained tones that were not practiced. Furthermore, the low-verbal participants showed higher improvement compared to the nonverbal participants.Conclusions: These data provide the first empirical evidence for adopting the AMMT-based training to facilitate speech and word learning in Mandarin-speaking nonverbal and low-verbal children with autism. This early efficacy study holds promise for improving lexical tone production in Mandarin-speaking children with autism but should be further replicated in larger scale randomized studies.Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.16834627