{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,24]],"date-time":"2026-07-24T06:02:55Z","timestamp":1784872975150,"version":"3.55.0"},"reference-count":49,"publisher":"Frontiers Media SA","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,24]],"date-time":"2026-07-24T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1784851200000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":["frontiersin.org"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["Front. Psychol."],"abstract":"<jats:sec>\n                    <jats:title>Introduction<\/jats:title>\n                    <jats:p>Prosodic focus marking plays a central role in conveying information structure, yet little is known about how Mandarin-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) use acoustic cues to signal contrastive focus in a tonal language.<\/jats:p>\n                  <\/jats:sec>\n                  <jats:sec>\n                    <jats:title>Methods<\/jats:title>\n                    <jats:p>Prosodic focus marking plays a central role in conveying information structure, yet little is known about how Mandarin-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) use acoustic cues to signal contrastive focus in a tonal language. This study examined pitch, duration, and intensity in sentence-initial and sentence-final focus produced by 20 Mandarin-speaking children with ASD and 20 age- and sex-matched typically developing (TD) peers. Using picture-based prompts, children produced simple subject-verb-object sentences, and acoustic measures of focus words (sentence-initial subject and sentence-final object) and post-focus verbs were analyzed with linear mixed-effects models.<\/jats:p>\n                  <\/jats:sec>\n                  <jats:sec>\n                    <jats:title>Results<\/jats:title>\n                    <jats:p>Children with ASD showed significantly higher pitch than TD children in sentence-final focus, with no group difference in sentence-initial focus. Duration ratio was significantly reduced only with high-tone verbs. Intensity ratio was lower in sentence-initial focus, but higher in sentence-final focus with high-tone verbs. In the post-focus region, children with ASD exhibited higher pitch than TD children for both high- and low-tone verbs, but showed larger duration ratio and lower intensity ratio only for low-tone verbs.<\/jats:p>\n                  <\/jats:sec>\n                  <jats:sec>\n                    <jats:title>Discussion<\/jats:title>\n                    <jats:p>These findings suggest that children with ASD are not globally impaired in focus marking, but show patterns that vary with focus position and tonal context.<\/jats:p>\n                  <\/jats:sec>","DOI":"10.3389\/fpsyg.2026.1898035","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,24]],"date-time":"2026-07-24T05:35:23Z","timestamp":1784871323000},"update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3389\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Prosodic marking of contrastive focus in Mandarin-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder"],"prefix":"10.3389","volume":"17","author":[{"given":"Jinting","family":"Yan","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Institute of Children\u2019s Language Rehabilitation, Cangzhou Normal University","place":["Cangzhou, China"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Chen","family":"Kuang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Foreign Languages, Hunan University","place":["Changsha, China"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Xiao","family":"Liang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Foreign Studies, Hunan University of Technology and Business","place":["Changsha, China"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Xinquan","family":"Sun","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Child Rehabilitation, Cangzhou Maternal and Child Health Hospital","place":["Cangzhou, China"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Fei","family":"Chen","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Foreign Languages, Hunan University","place":["Changsha, China"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"1965","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,24]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref1","volume-title":"Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental Disorders","year":"2013"},{"key":"ref2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"417","DOI":"10.1016\/S1364-6613(00)01538-2","article-title":"The episodic buffer: A new component of working memory?","volume":"4","author":"Baddeley","year":"2000","journal-title":"Trends Cogn. 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