Prosody Recognition in Adults With High‐Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders: From Psychoacoustics to Cognition

Abstract

Prosody is an important tool of human communication, carrying both affective and pragmatic messages in speech. Prosody recognition relies on processing of acoustic cues, such as the fundamental frequency of the voice signal, and their interpretation according to acquired socioemotional scripts. Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) show deficiencies in affective prosody recognition. These deficiencies have been mostly associated with general difficulties in emotion recognition. The current study explored an additional association between affective prosody recognition in ASD and auditory perceptual abilities. Twenty high-functioning male adults with ASD and 32 typically developing male adults, matched on age and verbal abilities undertook a battery of auditory tasks. These included affective and pragmatic prosody recognition tasks, two psychoacoustic tasks (pitch direction recognition and pitch discrimination), and a facial emotion recognition task, representing nonvocal emotion recognition. Compared with controls, the ASD group demonstrated poorer performance on both vocal and facial emotion recognition, but not on pragmatic prosody recognition or on any of the psychoacoustic tasks. Both groups showed strong associations between psychoacoustic abilities and prosody recognition, both affective and pragmatic, although these were more pronounced in the ASD group. Facial emotion recognition predicted vocal emotion recognition in the ASD group only. These findings suggest that auditory perceptual abilities, alongside general emotion recognition abilities, play a significant role in affective prosody recognition in ASD.

Emotions mediate the relationship between autistic traits and disordered eating: A new autistic-emotional model for eating pathology

“…Previous work has found that cognitive remediation therapy (CRT, Tchanturia et al, 2014) and emotion skills training (CREST, was helpful for ED patients, which could be extended to individuals at risk for both autistic traits and eating pathology. Finally, as difficulties regulating emotions are associated with the development of a range of psychopathologies including EDs and ASD (Globerson et al, 2015), interventions targeting emotion regulation may provide a transdiagnostic approach to resilience and mental health promotion programs, and the prevention of psychopathology more broadly.…”

“…Emotion dysregulation and negative attitudes towards emotional expression have been found to be entwined with both EDs (Harrison et al, 2010;Svaldi et al, 2012) and ASD (Samson et al, 2013). While research has consistently found a relationship between greater emotion regulation difficulties, including restricted access to emotion regulation strategies and lack of emotional clarity in both EDs (Meyer et al, 2010) and ASD (Globerson et al, 2015), research on negative attitudes towards emotions is more limited. The few studies assessing negative attitudes towards emotions revealed significant positive associations between eating pathology and the reduced tendency to express emotions (Haslam et al, 2012), as well as the belief that expressing emotions is a sign of weakness (Meyer et al, 2010).…”

“…CaglarNazali et al, 2014;Westwood et al, 2016, Zucker et al, 2007, investigations into other mechanisms linking the two disorders, have been scarce. Given that deficits in emotion regulation have been found in both EDs (Meyer et al, 2010;Svaldi et al, 2012) and ASD populations (Globerson et al, 2015), it is possible that the relationship between these disorders may be mediated by emotion-related traits. The current study therefore assessed the overlap between eating pathology and a range of autistic traits in a large sample of university students, and also assessed whether emotions mediate this relationship by exploring a new autistic-emotional model of eating pathology.…”

Relations Among Detection of Syllable Stress, Speech Abnormalities, and Communicative Ability in Adults With Autism Spectrum Disorders

“…In comparison to prosodic expressive abilities, fewer investigations have explored the processing skills of receptive prosody in individuals with ASD (McCann & Peppé, 2003;O'Connor, 2012;Globerson, Amir, Kishon-Rabin & Golan, 2014).…”

“…Most of the studies in this area have focused primarily on the perception of pragmatic/affective prosody (Chevallier, Noveck, Happé, & Wilson, 2011;Globerson et al, 2014;Golan, Baron-Cohen, & Hill, 2006;Golan, Baron-Cohen, Hill, & Rutherford, 2007;Grossman, Bemis, Plesa Skwerer, & Tager-Flusberg, 2010;Heikkinen et al, 2010;Järvinen-Pasley, Wallace, Ramus, Happé, & Heaton, 2008b;Jones et al, 2011;Kleinman, Marciano, & Ault, 2001;Lindner & Rosén, 2006;Peppé, McCann, Gibbon, O'Hare & Rutherford, 2007;Rutherford, Baron-Cohen, & Wheelwright, 2002). Several of these studies using complex vocal expressions (i.e.…”