Purpose We investigated perception and production of lexical stress and processing of affective prosody in adolescents with high functioning autism (HFA). We hypothesized preserved processing of lexical and affective prosody, but atypical lexical prosody production. Method 16 children with HFA and 15 typically developing (TD) peers participated in three experiments: 1. Perception of affective prosody, 2. Lexical stress perception, 3. Lexical stress production. In Experiment 1, participants labeled sad, happy, and neutral spoken sentences that were low-pass filtered, to eliminate verbal content. In Experiment 2 participants disambiguated word meanings based on lexical stress (HOTdog, vs. hotDOG). In Experiment 3 participants produced these words in a sentence completion task. Productions were analyzed using acoustic measures. Results Accuracy levels showed no group differences. Participants with HFA could determine affect from filtered sentences and disambiguate words based on lexical stress. They produced appropriately differentiated lexical stress patterns but demonstrated atypically long productions indicating reduced ability in natural prosody production. Conclusions Children with HFA were as capable as their TD peers in receptive tasks of lexical stress and affective prosody. Prosody productions were atypically long, despite accurate differentiation of lexical stress patterns. Future research should use larger samples and spontaneous vs. elicited productions.

People with Williams syndrome are extremely sociable, empathic, and expressive in communication. Some researchers suggest they may be especially sensitive to perceiving emotional expressions. We administered the Faces and Paralanguage subtests of the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy Scale (DANVA2), a standardized measure of emotion recognition for basic emotions to three groups: adolescents and adults with Williams syndrome, age and IQ-matched participants with learning/intellectual disability, and age-matched nonimpaired controls. The Williams syndrome and learning/intellectual disability groups performed significantly worse than the typically developing controls on both subtests, especially on negative emotions. Error analysis indicated the same general pattern of performance across versions and subtests of the DANVA2 for all groups. These findings suggest that emotion recognition is not spared in Williams syndrome.

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This research addresses the challenges of assessing receptive language abilities in minimally verbal children with autism spectrum disorder by comparing several adapted measurement tools: a standardized direct assessment of receptive vocabulary (i.e. Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-4); caregiver report measures including scores on the Vineland-II Communication domain and a vocabulary questionnaire consisting of a list of words ranging from simple, developmentally early, to more advanced words expected to be understood by at least some older children and adolescents; an eye-tracking test of word comprehension, using a word-image pair matching paradigm similar to that often used in studies of infant language acquisition; and a computerized assessment using a touch screen for directly measuring word comprehension with the same stimuli used in the eye-tracking experiment. Results of this multiple-method approach revealed significant heterogeneity in receptive language abilities across participants and across assessment methods. Our findings underscore the need to find individualized approaches for capturing the potential for language comprehension of minimally verbal children with autism spectrum disorder who remain otherwise untestable, using several types of assessment that may include methods based on eye-tracking or touch-screen responding.

The behavioral phenotype characteristic of Williams syndrome (WS) is marked by strong interest in social interaction, manifested in attention to human faces, empathy, approach behavior and social disinhibition, often coexisting with generalized anxiety. Despite their heightened social interest, people with WS show deficits in explicit emotion recognition tasks similar to those of people with other developmental disabilities. In the current study we explored whether individuals with WS show distinctive autonomic responsiveness to social-emotional information, using skin conductance response and heart rate measures. Autonomic activation was investigated in response to facial expressions of emotion in adolescents and adults with WS, compared to age-matched normal controls and to age-, IQ- and language-matched individuals with learning or intellectual disabilities (LID). Overall participants with WS were less electrodermally responsive to dynamically presented face stimuli than the age- and IQ-matched LID group, and showed more heart rate deceleration when viewing emotional faces than the controls. These findings, indicating hypoarousal but increased interest in response to the dynamic presentation of facial emotions in WS, are consistent with the behavioral profile of high approachability toward social stimuli in this population.

Entering a community of minds is conceptualized as a theoretical framework for understanding social cognitive development during the preschool years. This framework incorporates an experiential and social-pragmatic view of cognitive development. How language functions to advance the development of children’s understanding of the social world is a central issue within this framework. Two studies of 3- and 4-year-old children solving theory-of-mind-like problems and engaging in discourse about their responses are discussed in terms of the community of minds proposal, in particular that changes in their understanding of mental states reflect participation in discourse about social interactions within pragmatic contexts.

A growing number of research groups are now including older minimally verbal individuals with autism spectrum disorder in their studies to encompass the full range of heterogeneity in the population. There are numerous barriers that prevent researchers from collecting high-quality data from these individuals, in part because of the challenging behaviors with which they present alongside their very limited means for communication. In this article, we summarize the practices that we have developed, based on applied behavioral analysis techniques, and have used in our ongoing research on behavioral, eye-tracking, and electrophysiological studies of minimally verbal children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder. Our goal is to provide the field with useful guidelines that will promote the inclusion of the entire spectrum of individuals with autism spectrum disorder in future research investigations.

Autism and Williams syndrome are genetically based neurodevelopmental disorders that present strikingly different social phenotypes. Autism involves fundamental impairments in social reciprocity and communication, whereas people with Williams syndrome are highly sociable and engaging. This article reviews the behavioral and neuroimaging literature that has explored the neurocognitive mechanisms that underlie these contrasting social phenotypes, focusing on studies of face processing. The article concludes with a discussion of how the social phenotypes of both syndromes may be characterized by impaired connectivity between the amygdala and other critical regions in the 'social brain'.