Cepstral Space Projection on the Evaluation of Autistic Speech: A Pilot Study

The objective of the present study is to define potential biomarkers from the phonation of people with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD), for a better description of the syndrome functional behavior regarding stress when performing phonation tests, in sight of developing specific rehabilitation protocols to improve their communication skills. The study included sustained vowel utterances from three male and three female participants with ASD and intellectual disability to be compared with normative participants by gender, associated with neurological stress in performing vocalization tests. A methodology for visualizing and interpreting clustering plots of mel-frequency cepstral 2-dimensional representations of phonation has been proposed. The projection technique used shows a clear differentiated behavior between ASD and normative phonation descriptions.