Comprehension of Prosodically and Syntactically Marked Focus in Cantonese-Speaking Children With and Without Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Ge et al. (2023) tested how Cantonese-speaking children with and without autism understand focus in sentences. Focus tells the listener which word carries the new or important information.

Kids heard sentences that marked focus with word order (syntax) or with voice pitch (prosody). They pointed to pictures to show which part of the sentence was key.

Children with autism picked the right picture just as often as typical peers when word order showed the focus.

They were slower and less accurate when only voice pitch showed the focus. Syntax stayed strong; prosody slipped.

Jiang et al. (2025) ran almost the same task in Mandarin and got the same pattern—autistic kids missed prosodic cues. The two studies back each other up across tonal languages.

Ni et al. (2025) flipped the task: they asked kids to speak, not listen. Autistic kids produced weaker pitch cues when they had to mark focus in Mandarin as a second language. Together the papers show the prosody gap is both receptive and expressive.

Berkovits et al. (2014) seems to disagree: they found autistic kids struggled with tricky word-order shifts. Haoyan’s kids did fine with word order. The gap appears only when the sentence gives you a choice of two legal orders; Haoyan’s task used one clear order, so syntax looked intact.

If you test receptive language only through word order, you may miss a prosody problem. Add a quick pitch-cue item: say the same sentence with stress on different words and ask the child to point to the matching picture. When you write goals, teach the child to listen for pitch changes first; once they hear the cue, the syntax piece is likely already there.