Affective Prosody Perception and the Relation to Social Competence in Autistic and Typically Developing  Children.

This study used non-verbal emotional voice-clips to examine the ability of autistic and typically-developing children (7-13 years old) to extract affect from changes in prosody. This research also explored whether difficulty extracting affective intent from changes in prosody may be related to social competence. Autistic (n = 26) and typically-developing (n = 26) children accurately matched emotional voice-clips to emotion words, suggesting autistic children can accurately extract the affective meaning conveyed by changes in prosody. Autistic children were less accurate at matching the voice-clips to emotional faces, suggesting that autistic children may struggle to make use of prosodic information in a social context. Across both autistic and typically-developing children, prosody-face matching accuracy was found to predict overall social competence, as well as social inferencing abilities, suggesting that the inability to utilize affective information derived from a speaker's voice may interfere with effective social communication.
PMID: 32285352 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

Source: Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology - April 12, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Scheerer NE, Shafai F, Stevenson RA, Iarocci G Tags: J Abnorm Child Psychol Source Type: research