title: Prosody recognition in adults with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders: from psychoacoustics to cognition.
abstract: Prosody is an important tool of human communication, carrying both affective and pragmatic messages in speech. Prosody recognition relies on processing of acoustic cues, such as the fundamental frequency of the voice signal, and their interpretation according to acquired socioemotional scripts. Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) show deficiencies in affective prosody recognition. These deficiencies have been mostly associated with general difficulties in emotion recognition. The current study explored an additional association between affective prosody recognition in ASD and auditory perceptual abilities. Twenty high-functioning male adults with ASD and 32 typically developing male adults, matched on age and verbal abilities undertook a battery of auditory tasks. These included affective and pragmatic prosody recognition tasks, two psychoacoustic tasks (pitch direction recognition and pitch discrimination), and a facial emotion recognition task, representing nonvocal emotion recognition. Compared with controls, the ASD group demonstrated poorer performance on both vocal and facial emotion recognition, but not on pragmatic prosody recognition or on any of the psychoacoustic tasks. Both groups showed strong associations between psychoacoustic abilities and prosody recognition, both affective and pragmatic, although these were more pronounced in the ASD group. Facial emotion recognition predicted vocal emotion recognition in the ASD group only. These findings suggest that auditory perceptual abilities, alongside general emotion recognition abilities, play a significant role in affective prosody recognition in ASD.
authors.affiliation: Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel; Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, Jerusalem, Israel.
authors.forename: Eitan
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Globerson
authors.forename: Noam
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Amir
authors.forename: Liat
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Kishon-Rabin
authors.forename: Ofer
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Golan
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000067877:Autism Spectrum Disorder / Q000503:physiopathology*; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology; D003463:Cues; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010897:Pitch Discrimination / Q000502:physiology*; D011571:Psychoacoustics; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D012919:Social Behavior; D013060:Speech; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: autism; emotion recognition; pitch; prosody; psychoacoustics