Can children with autistic spectrum disorders 
perceive affect in music? An experimental 
investigation

Heaton, Pam F.; Hermelin, Beate; Pring, Linda

doi:10.1017/s0033291799001221

Cited by 114 publications

(111 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Researchers have reported that children with ASD who have affective and interpersonal deficits can perceive affect in music (Heaton, Hermelin & Pring, 1999).…”

Section: Perception Of Music In Children With Asdmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Musical stimuli are commonly organized and perceived by patterns, and this musical pattern perception is observed in children with ASD (Heaton, Hermelin & Pring, 1999;Orr, Myles & Carlson, 1999). Pattern perception is also the primary mechanism for speech and language in children with ASD (Prizant, 1983).…”

Section: Perception Of Music In Children With Asdmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Consequently, musical patterns may stimulate and activate intact neural processes for other types of auditory information (Berger, 2002;Thaut, 1988;Heaton, et al;.…”

Section: Pattern Perception Of Music and Speech In Children With Asdmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Effect of "Developmental Speech and Language Training Through Music" on Speech Production in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Lim

2010

Journal of Music Therapy

108

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of a dissertation at the University of Miami.Dissertation supervised by Professor Shannon de l'Etoile. No. of pages in text. (172) Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders demonstrate deficits in speech and language, with the most outstanding speech impairments being in comprehension, semantics, prosody, and pragmatics. Perception and production of music and speech in children with ASD appear to follow the same principles of Gestalt pattern perceptual organization. In addition, common neuroanatomical structures and similar patterns of cortical activation mediate the perception and production of speech and music. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore how the perception of musical stimuli would impact the perception and production of speech and language in children with ASD. The study examined the effect of developmental speech-language training through music on the speech production of children with ASD. The participants were 50 children with ASD, age range 3 to 5 years, who had previously been evaluated on standard tests of language and level of functioning. The children completed the pre-test, six sessions of training, and the post-test. The pre-and post-tests consisted of the Verbal Production Evaluation Scale (VPES) and measured each participant's verbal production including semantics, phonology, pragmatics, and prosody, of 36 target words. Eighteen participants completed music training, in which they watched a music video containing six songs and pictures of the 36 target words. Another group of eighteen participants completed speech training, in which they watched a speech video containing six stories and pictures of target words. Fourteen participants were randomly assigned to a no-training condition.Results of the study showed that participants in both music and speech training significantly increased their scores on the VPES from the pre-test to the post-test. Both music and speech training were effective for enhancing participants' speech production including semantics, phonology, pragmatics, and prosody. Participants who received music training made greater progress on speech production than participants who received the speech training; however, the difference was not statistically significant.Results of the study also indicated that the level of speech production was influenced by the level of functioning in children with ASD. An interaction between level of functioning and training conditions on speech production approached significance. The results indicate that both high and low functioning participants improved their speech production after receiving either music or speech training; however, low functioning participants showed a greater improvement in speech production after the music training than after the speech training. Collectively, music training was more effective for speech production in low functioning children with ASD than was speech training. The study suggests that the superior performance in speech production in children with ASD who received music training mi...

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“…Researchers have reported that children with ASD who have affective and interpersonal deficits can perceive affect in music (Heaton, Hermelin & Pring, 1999).…”

Section: Perception Of Music In Children With Asdmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Perception Of Music In Children With Asdmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Effect of "Developmental Speech and Language Training Through Music" on Speech Production in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Lim

2010

Journal of Music Therapy

108

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“…One of the design paradigms was to strive for agency (Happé, 1999;Frith & Happé, 1999;Heaton, 1999): putting the children "in charge" of an environment that was at once rich with sensory offerings and devoid of any social context or symbolic content. Another important design paradigm was the cross-modal, or 'synaesthetic' aspect (Williams, Gumtau, & Mackness, 2012).…”

Section: Mediatementioning

confidence: 99%

IRRODL Volume 13, Number 4

Authors

2012

IRRODL

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“…As discussed by Khetrapal, the article by Khalfa, Roy, Rainville, Dalla Bella & Peretz (2008) showed that happy-sad distinctions in music are mainly dependent on pitch cues, so studying pitch was the most reasonable place to begin the exploration of musical emotion perception in ASD. These studies have shown that children with autism can match the emotion conveyed by a piece of music to a schematic happy or sad face (Heaton, Hermelin & Pring, 1999) or to a pictorial representation of a more complex emotion, such as tenderness (Heaton, Allen, Williams, Cummins & Happé, 2008). The second study may have required perception and encoding of cues other than pitch and key to make the emotion judgments (for example, differentiating fear from anger).…”

Section: Asd and Auditory Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Commentary on "Why Does Music Therapy Help in Autism?" by N. Khetrapal

Bhatara¹

2009

Empirical Musicology Review

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Khetrapal reviews the literature on music and autism and stresses the need for a greater focus on the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying both autism and music perception. I build upon this review and discuss the strong connections between speech prosody and emotion in music. These connections imply that emotion recognition training in one domain can influence emotion recognition in the other. Understanding of emotional speech is frequently impaired in individuals with ASD, so music therapy should be explored further as a possible treatment.

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Can children with autistic spectrum disorders perceive affect in music? An experimental investigation

Abstract: In contrast to their performance within social and interpersonal domains, children with autistic disorders showed no deficits in processing affect in musical stimuli.

Cited by 114 publications

References 27 publications

Effect of "Developmental Speech and Language Training Through Music" on Speech Production in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Effect of "Developmental Speech and Language Training Through Music" on Speech Production in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

IRRODL Volume 13, Number 4

Commentary on "Why Does Music Therapy Help in Autism?" by N. Khetrapal

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