Among the communicative characteristics of children in the second and third year of life who are identified with autism, delayed onset and development of spoken language tends to be one of the key signs and symptoms. Approximately 10–25% of ASD children fail to develop speech to communicate with others. Due to the known deficits that characterise the theory of mind in autism, researchers have identified that pragmatic skill is the most seriously impaired in terms of language deficits in ASD children. In contrast, less attention has been paid to articulatory and phonological deficits among this population.

To improve the pronunciation skills of children with ASD, Prof. Peng Gang, Prof. Chen Fei (CBS PhD Graduate), and their collaborators have developed and evaluated a 3-D virtual pronunciation tutor, which presents both places and manners of Mandarin articulation to ASD children. Furthermore, they have also evaluated the therapeutic potential of auditory-motor mapping training (AMMT) in facilitating speech and word production for Mandarin-speaking low-verbal (including nonverbal) ASD children.

Key takeaways from the study Children with ASD can benefit more from the 3-D tutor exhibited on a computer screen in comparison to real human face videos (see Figure 1). ASD children pay attention to the additional articulation and airflow information with a 3-D profile view (see Figure 1(B)). AMMT has been shown to facilitate speech and word output for Mandarin-speaking low-verbal children with ASD.

Figure 1. The homolographic areas inside the dashed red rectangle are closely related to speech production (with syllable po [pho] as an example). The AOI with a front view mainly incorporates lip movement area, and the AOI with a transparent profile view in the 3-D tutor contains the movement of external and internal articulators (including mouth, tongue, teeth, jaw, and palate) and the airflow changes. Figure extracted from “Development and evaluation of a 3-D virtual pronunciation tutor for children with autism spectrum disorders”.

The findings in the above study indicate that ASD children who are struggling with speech production can benefit more from the 3-D tutor exhibited on a computer screen. By demonstrating additional visual information during speech production, the 3-D tutor provides an efficient pronunciation training method to enhance consonant and vowel production skills, advocating multimodal learning environments to enhance speech production and other language skills among the ASD cohort.

Figure 2. The user interface of the app (on the left: six vocabulary themes which include vegetables, fruit, animals, daily necessities, snacks, and toys; on the right: a vocabulary item—tiger). Figure extracted from “Auditory-motor mapping training facilitates speech and word learning in tone language–speaking children with autism: An early efficacy study”.

The second study provides the first empirical evidence for adopting the AMMT-based training to facilitate speech and word learning in Mandarin-speaking low-verbal (including nonverbal) children with ASD. This early efficacy study holds promise for improving lexical tone production in Mandarin-speaking children with ASD.

Prof. Peng Gang is Professor at the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Prof. Chen Fei is Professor at the School of Foreign Languages, Hunan University.