Original Paper Folia Phoniatr Logop 2017;69:67–77 Comprehension of “Narrow Focus” by Adolescents in the Autism Spectrum Osnat Segal Dafna Kaplan Smadar Patael Liat Kishon-Rabin Department of Communication Disorders, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University, Petah Tiqwa, Israel Published online: December 15, 2017 Osnat Segal 7b Zelig Bas Petah Tiqva (Israel) E-Mail segalll @netvision.net.il © 2017 S. Karger AG, Basel E-Mail karger@karger.com www.karger.com/fpl DOI: 10.1159/000477399 Keywords Adolescents with autistic spectrum disorder · Narrow focus · Prosody Abstract Objective: The study compared the performance of adoles- cents with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) to that of age- matched peers with typical development (TD) and cognitive language-matched peers with TD on measures of identifica- tion and comprehension of “narrow focus.” Participants: Forty-nine participants, 17 autistic, 17 TD peers matched for age and sex, and 15 TD children matched for expressive vo- cabulary participated in the study. Method: The Hebrew Nar- row Focus Test (HNFT) was used. The HNFT includes 3 sub- tests. The first subtest (A) required identification of the stressed word in the sentence based on psychoacoustic abil- ities alone. The second (B) and third (C) subtests required understanding the meaning of focused stress in different contexts. In subtest B, the meaning of “narrow focus” was to contrast other possibilities related to the lexical-grammati- cal role of the stressed word in the sentence, whereas in sub- test C, the meaning was to indicate a mistake. Results: ASD participants showed reduced performance compared to peers across all the subtests of the HNFT, but similar perfor- mance compared to TD children in subtests A and B and bet- ter performance on subtest C. A significant correlation was found between the Raven test for assessing nonverbal intel- ligence and subtests B and C of the HNFT in the group of adolescents with ASD. Conclusions: Comprehension of nar- row focus in adolescents with ASD who study in a special educational system is related to their cognitive-linguistic abilities and not to the autistic condition by itself or to its se- verity. © 2017 S. Karger AG, Basel Introduction Prosody refers to the pitch, intensity, and durational qualities of speech [1]. These acoustic, suprasegmental changes create different prosodic features, such as into- nation, lexical stress, and sentential emphasis, also termed as “narrow focus” [2–4]. Narrow focus refers to the ac- cent/stress that falls on the accent-bearing syllable of one word in the sentence and highlights the part of informa- tion that has a special meaning [5, 6]. Studies have shown that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD)