Music Therapy for Speech and Prosody in Autistic Children (MTSPAC)

Overview

This research is a single-blind randomized controlled trial, where the investigators plan to recruit 40 children with autism, randomly divided into two groups. The music therapy intervention group will receive an hour of group music therapy in addition to traditional language therapy. The control group will receive only traditional language therapy. The trial will last for 8 weeks, and participants in both groups will be assessed before and after the trial. During the study, the investigators will use professional recording equipment to record their speech and use the speech analysis software to objectively compare whether there are significant differences in prosody between the two groups of children with autism before and after the intervention. Besides the acoustic measurement the investigators also assess the language abilities autism trait performance, adaptive function, emotional behavior, and parent-child stress levels.

This research is a single-blind randomized controlled trial, where the investigators plan to recruit 40 children with autism, randomly divided into two groups. The music therapy intervention group will receive an hour of group music therapy in addition to traditional language therapy. The control group will receive only traditional language therapy. The trial will last for 8 weeks, and participants in both groups will be assessed before and after the trial. During the study, the investigators will use professional recording equipment to record their speech and use the speech analysis software to objectively compare whether there are significant differences in prosody between the two groups of children with autism before and after the intervention. Besides the acoustic measurement the investigators also assess the language abilities autism trait performance, adaptive function, emotional behavior, and parent-child stress levels. The study hypothesizes that music therapy can contribute to improving language development delays in children with autism and may enhance their language development further by ameliorating prosody abnormalities. The investigators hope that this research can propose more diversified therapeutic methods for language development in children with autism.