Earlier Identification of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder : An Automatic Vocalisation-based Approach

• Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder usually diagnosed in or beyond toddlerhood. ASD is defined by repetitive and restricted behaviours, and deficits in social communication. The early speech-language development of individuals with ASD has been characterised as delayed. However, little is known about ASD-related characteristics of pre-linguistic vocalisations at the feature level. In this study. we examined pre-linguistic vocalisations of 10-month-old individuals later diagnosed with ASD and a matched control group of typically developing individuals (N = 20). We segmented 684 vocalisations from parent-child interaction recordings. All vocalisations were annotated and signal-analytically decomposed. We analysed ASD-related vocalisation specificities on the basis of a standardised set (eGeMAPS) of 88 acoustic features selected for clinical speech analysis applications. 54 features showed evidence for a differentiation between vocalisations of individuals later diagnosed with ASD and controls. In addition, we evaluated the feasibility of automated, vocalisation-based identification of individuals later diagnosed with ASD. We compared linear kernel support vector machines and a 1-layer bidirectional long short-term memory neural network. Both classification approaches achieved an accuracy of 75% for subject-wise identification in a subject-independent 3-fold cross-validation scheme. Our promising results may be an important contribution en-route to facilitate earlier identification of ASD.

Ämnesord

MEDICIN OCH HÄLSOVETENSKAP  -- Klinisk medicin -- Psykiatri (hsv//swe)

MEDICAL AND HEALTH SCIENCES  -- Clinical Medicine -- Psychiatry (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

autism spectrum disorder

early identification

infant vocalisation analysis

speech-language pathology

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