The voice of the autistic child: the singing voice stimulus as a support for communication

• Autor(a) principal: Machado, Rosalina
• Data de Publicação: 2008
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.34632/cadernosdesaude.2008.2771

The voice of the children with autistic spectrum disorder is monochord, showing no flexibility, or any kind of emotion. This study focuses on the abnormal voice of the autistic children and aims to analyse whether the professional singing voice can interfere in their speaking voice. Our intent is to know if the fundamental frequency (F0) changes after a period of analysis using a singing stimulus. The sample under analysis are the students that study on the TEACCH (Treatment and Education of Autistic and Related Communication Handicapped Children)  classes of four primary schools in the district of Lisbon, being the study performed on the school installations with a sample of 20 children with ages that ranged between 5 and 13 years old. The TEACCH classes have a specific methodology developed for autistics children. The musical sessions that were performed as part of the study, consisted of singing a music during 15 minutes with an instrumental record, so that each children could hear and feel the sensation of a singing voice, performed by a professional singer. The individual data was retrieved using the Audacity application. The words that were selected from each child were afterwards analyzed in Praat to obtain its average of the F0. Although, it is not possible to generalize the results. The present study shows that ten musical sessions were enough to create change in the F0 (P=0,008; x=0.1) as well as, changes in the behaviour of the children participating in this study.