The Perception of the Relationship Between Affective Prosody and the Emotional Content in Utterances in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders

Abstract

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) were compared to children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing (TD) children and adults in their ability to perceive and judge the emotional information conveyed by happy, neutral, and sad prosody. Authors found that high-functioning verbal children with ASD have an implicit sensitivity to emotional prosody, but are unable to explicitly judge the emotion of the same prosody. Children with SLI showed they were better able to judge the emotional prosody, similar to TD children, although not as well as adults. The findings indicate that, unique to the children with ASD, there is a disconnect between the implicit processing of emotional prosody and the explicit labeling of the emotion in prosody. This is promising for interventions aimed at facilitating the abilities of ASD children in their everyday understanding of emotional prosody in conversation.