This document describes a study that aimed to automatically identify "pedantic" words in the speech of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) compared to typically developing children. The researchers analyzed transcribed speech samples from 114 children and defined pedantic words as those more frequent in the Wall Street Journal corpus than child language corpora. They found that language impairment and ASD diagnosis were negatively correlated with mean pedantry scores, suggesting typically developing children used relatively more pedantic words. The researchers hope to expand this work by refining their methods and using additional child language corpora and word senses.

1. Identifying Pedantic Speech in Children with Autism
Spectrum Disorder
Allison Sliter, Katina Papadakis, & Jan Van Santen
Oregon Health & Science University, Center for Spoken Language Understanding
Contact Information:
Center for Spoken Language Understanding
Oregon Health &Science University
3181 SW Sam Jackson Park Road
Phone: +1 (503) 346-3753
Email: sliter@ohsu.edu
Abstract
Many clinicians and parents of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder
(ASD) report hearing “pedantic speech” from their child. However, “pedantic
speech” is rarely if ever defined in the literature, and has not been operational-
ized in a manner to allow comparisons between the speech of typically de-
veloping children and their ASD peers. We attempted to automatically iden-
tify “pedantic” words from childrens’ speech samples, and examined whether
children with ASD use a larger proportion of those words than did typically-
developing children.
Introduction
“Pedantic speech may be defined as...vocabulary [that] displays the erudition ex-
pected of written language” [2].
Data Source
Figure 1: Probability of a word appearing in the Wall Street Journal as a function
of it appearing in a child corpus, one of 3 corpora used for this experiment
1 Methods
Our data: transcribed speech samples from 114 children, ages 4.2 - 8.91 years,
88 males and 26 females in four diagnostic groups (typically developing (TD,
n = 42), diagnosed ASD with language impairment (ALI, n = 26), diagnosed
ASD without language impairment (ALN, n = 25), and diagnosed Specific Lan-
guage Impairment (SLI, n = 20)
We compared their word usages to several other collections: - speech from other
children [3] [5] - speech from adults [1] - the Wall Street Journal corpus [4]
We defined “pedantic” words as words whose frequency in the WSJ corpus was
much more higher than its frequency in the corpus of childrens’ speech. We then
measured how relatively frequently each child used those pedantic words, and
determined whether their diagnosis was a good predictor of using more or fewer
of them.
Children in the TD group produced more speech than children in the other
groups. We addressed this issue by using bootstrapping to estimate a per-child
“mean pedantry score.”
Results
Figure 2: Mean pedantry score based on WSJ/child corpus comparisons by diag-
nostic group (higher value is more pedantic)
Language impairment seems to have a negative correlation, but so
does ASD diagnosis status.
Conclusions
The original idea of seeing what proportion of words used by the
subjects are more “at home” in an adult corpus versus a child cor-
pus did not have the relationship we expected.
Table 1: Most “Pedantic” words by Corpus
Wall Street Journal “Company”, “Shares”
This American Life corpus “OK”, “Actually”
CallHome corpus “Anyway”, “Actually”
Forthcoming Research
Going forward, we hope to expand and refine these findings through
the following explorations:
•Using word-sense disambiguation to only compare same senses of
same word
•Some word-stemming to decrease sparsity
•Additional child corpora to improve baseline
•Additional written corpus to avoid falling into idiosyncrasies.
References
[1] Alexandra Canavan, David Graff, and George Zipperlen. Callhome american english speech. Linguistic Data
Consortium, 1997.
[2] Mohammad Ghaziuddin and Leonore Gerstein. Pedantic speaking style differentiates asperger syndrome from
high-functioning autism. Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 26(6):585–595, 1996.
[3] Brian MacWhinney. The CHILDES project: The database, volume 2. Psychology Press, 2000.
[4] Douglas B Paul and Janet M Baker. The design for the wall street journal-based csr corpus. In Proceedings of the
workshop on Speech and Natural Language, pages 357–362. Association for Computational Linguistics, 1992.
[5] Khaldoun Shobaki, John-Paul Hosom, and Ronald Cole. The ogi kids’ speech corpus and recognizers. In Proc.
of ICSLP, pages 564–567, 2000.
Acknowledgements
The work reported here was supported in part by grants R01DC007129-01 and R01DC012033 from the National
Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, and Innovative Technology for Autism Grant 2407 from
Autism Speaks.