Ability of children with language impairment to understand emotion conveyed by prosody in a narrative passage

Abstract

The results provide additional evidence that children with language impairment may have impairments in emotion understanding. If these findings are replicated, interventions designed to facilitate emotion understanding as an aspect of social communication should be considered for some children with language impairment.

Prosodic constraints on inflected words: An area of difficulty for German-speaking children with specific language impairment?

“…A number of studies suggest that aspects of prosody are a problematic area (Marshall, Hartcourt-Brown, Ramus, & van der Lely, 2009;Peppé, 2009;Peppé & McCann, 2003;Stojanovic & Setter, 2009;van der Meulen, Janssen, & Den Os, 1997;Weinert, 1992). Diverse manifestations of prosodic impairments in SLI have been shown; among others reduced performance in intonation tasks, differences in prosodic processing (Sabisch, Hahne, Glass, von Suchodoletz, & Friederici, 2009), limited understanding of the emotional meaning of prosody (Fujiki, Spackman, Brinton, & Illig, 2008) or problems in recognising and exploiting prosodic cues (Fisher, Plante, Vance, Gerken, & Glattke, 2007;Weinert, 1992). For the purpose of this study, problems with the perception or production of lexical stress are especially relevant.…”

Aligning Theory and Assessment of Reading Fluency: Automaticity, Prosody, and Definitions of Fluency

“…Uncertainty is signaled by a sustained rise in pitch (Hirschberg, 2002). However, during the period where children are developing fluency, their concomitant understanding of emotional prosody is still not fully adultlike (Fujiki, Spackman, Brinton, & Illig, 2008;Wells & Peppe, 2003), so we should not expect them to convey these attitudes fully in their readings.…”

Superior temporal activation in response to dynamic audio-visual emotional cues

“…Laboratory investigations are most useful when their findings can be generalized to real social interactions, and this is most likely to be possible when the stimuli most closely reflect the social demands and real-world experiences. Using autism as an example, the unimodal emotion perception literature indicates mixed results when examining deficits in emotion processing; some studies indicate that individuals with ASD have difficulty identifying facial expressions (e.g., Adolphs, Sears, & Piven, 2001; Celani, Battacchi, & Arcidiacono, 1999; Hobson, Ouston, & Lee, 1988; Yirmiya, Sigman, Kasari, & Mundy, 1992), and emotional prosody (Boucher, Lewis, & Collis, 2000; Fujiki, Spackman, Brinton, & Illig, 2008; Peppe, McCann, Gibbon, O’Hare, & Rutherford, 2007), compared to typically developing children, whereas others find no significant differences between individuals with ASD and controls (Gepner et al, 2001; Ozonoff, Pennington, & Rogers, 1990). However, there have been very few studies examining the integration of audiovisual emotion cues in autism (e.g., Haviland, Walker-Andrews, Huffman, Toci, & Alton, 1996; Loveland et al, 1995), and the prior studies use paradigms that are not comparable to naturalistic social interactions, such as preferential looking paradigms in which the participant sees two video displays and hears one audio track.…”