A Study On Emotional Rhythm Of Autistic Children In Chinese

The present study aimed to make a comprehensive investigation to the ability of emotional prosody in Chinese children with autism from perception and production. In the perception task, we paid close attention to whether Chinese children with autism have deficits in emotional prosody recognition, and how the emotion intensities affected the emotional prosody recognition results; in the production task, we main concerned whether these children with disorder have difficulties in the expression of emotional prosody and its reflection in acoustic parameters.Therefore, our research respectively selected 34 Chinese children with autism and typically developing children in the perception task, and 15 Chinese children with autism and 15 typically developing children was selected in the production task. The compared two group subjects who participated in these two tasks were matched by chronological age, gender, verbal IQ, performance IQ and full IQ. In the perception task, sentences without obvious verbal content were chose as target sentences, and each target sentence was spoken with happy, sad, angry and fear prosody in weak and strong two different intensities respectively. Then we analyzed the scores and error patterns of emotional prosody recognition in Chinese children with autism and typically developing children to discuss the capacity of emotional prosody recognition in Chinese children with autism. In the production task, the emotion of happiness, sadness and neutrality were tested. In this task, utterances elicited by repetition and by spontaneous production were analyzed by phonetic features and comparing them to subjective ratings of produced emotion.The study got following results and conclusions:Firstly, the scores of emotional prosody recognition of Chinese children with autism were worse than that of typically developing children both in general and only in the weak or strong intensity condition. The result turned out that Chinese children with autism have difficulty in decoding emotional prosody, and these deficits were not restricted to specific emotions but global. The deficits presented because it was more difficult for Chinese children with autism to differentiate emotions with similar dimension features or prosodic features from each other.Secondly, the divergence of emotional intensity had a different impact on Chinese children with autism and contrast children. It might be caused by the fact that Chinese children with autism have different processing features from typically developing children in emotional speech prosody recognition. The emotion intensity only affected the process of emotions with lower arousal dimension but not for that of higher arousal one for Chinese children with autism. As to typically developing children, they took not only the emotion intensity but also other characteristics of stimuli into consideration.Thirdly, the emotional prosody output of Chinese children with autism was abnormal, they were unable to regulate the pitch range of happy statement effectively and slow down the speech rate of sad utterance properly just as the typically developing group in the repetition task. In the spontaneous production tasks, although the performance of two group was comparatively poor, the autistic group could not distinguish sad statement from other two emotions relying on sentence length like the-typically developing children.