Autism

Biography

Biography: Liang Dandan

Abstract

An important difference between spoken language and written language is that spoken language carries prosodic information. Previous studies revealed that prosody is an important factor in spoken emotional understanding and expression，especially when the emotion of speech contents is not clear. Autistics tend to speak with flat tone, like parrot and mechine. Recent studies suggest that abnormal prosody is a core disorder in autistic social communication. Therefore, to explore the recognition mechanism of emotional prosody in autistics is needed,while there is little evidence from Mandarin-speaking children with autism. This paper investigated the ability of Mandarin-speaking children with high-functioning autism （HFA） to recognize the four emotions of happiness, anger, sadness and fear under spontaneous emotion conditions and reinforced emotion conditions using an emotion auditory recognizing task. It was found that under spontaneous emotion conditions, the recognition accuracy for the four emotions of children with HFA were significantly lower than that of typically developing (TD） children, indicating overall impairment in autistic children. And under reinforced conditions, significant difference was manifested in the mechanism of emotion recognition between children with HFA and TD children. Similar to TD children, children with HFA exhibited stronger ability to recognize anger with reinforced emotion. But unlike TD children, children with HFA had difficulty recognizing changes in the activation of sadness and fear, and with increase in intensity of emotion, autistic children had difficulty recognizing acoustic cues correlated with the valence of happiness.