Behavioral Study on Emotional Voice Perception in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

Previous studies conducted on children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and their abilities to recognize the psychological states of others have primarily focused on visual aspects such as facial expression and perception. The aims of this study were to clarify the characteristics of auditory information processing mechanisms in individuals with ASD in order to expand our understanding of those with ASD and to contribute to improvements in their social adaptability. The behavioral characteristics of voice cognition in ASD were investigated in 12 individuals with ASD (mean age = 11.83 years) and 12 matched typical development (TD) controls (mean age = 11.58 years). Participants were asked to judge the emotional valence of vocal stimuli with happy, angry, or neutral expressions (emotion task) and select illustrations that best correspond to the semantics of the vocal stimuli (semantic task). The ASD group had significantly (p = 0.013) longer reaction times in the emotion task, suggesting that they have difficulty distinguishing emotional valence. In the semantic task, the ASD group had lower understanding of the meaning of sentences when voices were presented with angry expressions. These results suggest the importance of the emotions conveyed in verbal speech during conversations with individuals with ASD.

Voice Production and Perception

“…Atypical prosody features in individuals with ASD include increased or decreased intonation variability, atypical stress patterns and volume modulation, and inappropriate phrasing (e.g., Green & Tobin, 2009;McCann & Peppé, 2003;Nadig & Shaw, 2012;Paul et al, 2005). However, results are inconsistent in terms of differences between those with and without ASD in recognizing emotions expressed in the voice (see Matsumoto et al, 2016). There are multiple studies that have found that individuals with ASD have difficulty in understanding others' emotions from the voice (e.g., Mazefsky & Oswald, 2007;Philip et al, 2010), while other studies have not found any such differences (e.g., Grossman et al, 2010;Jones et al, 2011).…”

Brainstem Encoding of Speech and Music Sounds in Humans

“…On the other hand, even within tone-language speakers, a decline in FFR pitch tracking is seen in older adults (Wang et al, 2016). Russo et al (Russo et al, 2008) noted weaker pitch tracking in school-age children on the autism spectrum compared to typically developing peers, evocative of the characteristic flat affect in the speech of some autistic individuals and the diminished ability to perceive emotional valence (Matsumoto et al, 2016). Imperfect perception of the contours of speech pitch may have a bearing on aberrant speech production.…”