Characteristics of the Understanding and Expression of Emotional Prosody among Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

In verbal communication with others, children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) experience difficulties with understanding jokes, irony, and other pragmatic aspects of communication. Difficulties with the understanding and expression of prosody may be one reason. In this study an understanding of prosody test and an expression of prosody test were constructed and applied to a group of children with ASD (average 9.7 years of age) and three control groups of typical children (3, 4 and 5 years of age, respectively). Overall results showed that the ASD group had lower scores in both prosody tests compared to 5 year old controls but higher scores than the 3 year old controls.