A new paper comparing the ability to match pitch and duration in speech and song is providing valuable insight into vocal imitation deficits for children and adults with autism spectrum disorder.

The results show how individuals with ASD perform quite differently in two different categories of pitch imitation, a finding that has broad implications when thinking about the challenges associated with autism, including difficulties when interacting with others and making social connections.

«This project shows that some of the conclusions we may want to draw about autism from other tasks may not be as widely generalizable as we think,» says Peter Pfordresher, a professor of psychology in the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences and a co-author of the study, which was led by Fang Liu, associate professor of psychology and clinical language sciences at the University of Reading.

The research team found that autistic children and adults were better at imitating and holding relative pitch than they were with absolute pitch across both speech and music domains. There’s a significant distinction between the two that is illustrated using the melody associated with the nursery rhyme «Mary Had a Little Lamb.»

Absolute pitch is the specific note associated with each syllable in a song. Think about the seven notes you would produce when singing «Mary Had a Little Lamb.» Absolute pitch is the ability to sing each note correctly, essentially matching the notes after hearing the tune. This definition differs from what musical performers would call absolute, or sometimes, perfect pitch, which refers to the ability to identify or sing a note without an immediate reference.

Relative pitch, meanwhile, is the pitch change from one note to the next, or the interval separating the pitch in the first syllable of «Mary» from the word’s second syllable.

Story Source:
Materials provided by University at Buffalo. Original written by Bert Gambini. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.