Vocal Imitation Deficits

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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 (ASD).

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.

“Previous research in areas such as action imitation has suggested that people with ASD can reproduce the end goal of another’s action, but not the exact form in which the action is carried out. That’s where we see atypical imitation,” says Liu.

As an example, Liu says that an autistic individual, when asked to imitate the action of reaching for a cup, might just get the cup without trying to mimic the exact trajectory of the arm as it goes through the reaching motion.

I don't really understand what these articles are trying to say but I get the impression that they're using too much time, effort and money on the tiniest details on how a 5-year-old might sing a nursery rhyme (which, whenever I've heard a small child sing, is typically off-key anyway). And older children and adults on the spectrum can be brilliant singers. Look at Susan Boyle.

But I might be wrong, and if these articles explained their point in English I might understand what on earth they're trying to say.

The article leaves much to be desired. What it is trying to say, it seems, is that Autism people have the ability to sing adequately enough solo, be can't harmonize worth a damn. They are trying to suggest that the inability to harmonize with others indicates an inability to match social expectations or cues that would allow for easier social interaction.

I am honestly a bit baffled by why this correlation is being highlighted, as singing capacity and ability to harmonize isn't really a good indicator of this social quality, and even if it were there are plenty of NT people who can't harmonize with others worth a damn.

I think that the article is just a bit of flashy news, and not really a full blown study. It lacks any links to data sources, and doesn't indicate a control group (Presumably a bunch of NT's pulled off the street being asked to sing solo for a bit and then sing again in a harmonic choir). So without those, it just sounds like people making guesses about qualities that define Autism in a musical capacity.