Teaching Students w/ASD 2.2: Communication Intervention: Prosody

What is prosody? "Prosody is the rhythm of speech, its rise and fall, energy and intonation. That rhythm does a tremendous amount of work. " (Denworth, 2018)
	Intervention
Challenge  Prosody   “People on the spectrum may speak in a monotone way, or do the opposite and exaggerate their intonation.”  (Denworth, 2018)	Student uses a high pitch and loud voice emphasizing the last word of a sentence making all  her sentences exclamatory.   Ex: I go shopping at BUY-LOW! I go OUTSIDE!
Objective	-Student will identify emotions associated with raised loud voice   -Student will apply appropriate tone of voice for statements and exclamatory sentences
Intervention Delivery	-Whole class explicit instruction on emotions and punctuation (periods and exclamation marks) using photographs of children  with different emotions and sentence strips   -Use Voice Memos app  (air dropped) to show the difference between an exclamatory sentence versus a statement   -Modeling how to voice expression/volume changes depending on the punctuation at the end of the sentence Student-monitoring of teacher   -Paired Practice/ Peer-monitoring Students pick photograph and read sentence strip to partner using correct expression, partner gives feedback     Continued practice with peer for two weeks moving from sentence strips to use of student with ASD’s communication book and photographs of emotions   The above intervention delivery is based on the idea that people with ASD are less likely to perceive emotions through speech and may produce emotional speech in an irregular way. People with ASD can be explicitly taught to use expression to communicate emotion and to perceive emotion. (Hubbard, Fasso, Assmann, and Sasoon, 2017)   The intervention is multimodal and provides opportunity for safe practice through choral reading and paired practice with opportunity for feedback,(Denworth, n.d.)

 

References

 

Denworth, L. (2018, April 18). Where communication breaks down for people with autism. Retrieved May 23, 2020, from https://www.spectrumnews.org/features/deep-dive/communication-breaks-people-autism/

 

Hasbrouck, J. (n.d.). Developing Fluent Readers. Retrieved May 23, 2020, from https://www.readingrockets.org/article/developing-fluent-readers

 

Hubbard, D. J., Faso, D. J., Assmann, P. F., & Sasson, N. J. (2017). Production and perception of emotional prosody by adults with autism spectrum disorder. Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 10(12), 1991–2001. https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.1847