Lexical and affective prosody in children with high-functioning autism

Vocal Emotion Recognition in Autism: Behavioral Performance and Event-Related Potential (ERP) Response

Autistic youth display difficulties in emotion recognition, yet little research has examined behavioral and neural indices of vocal emotion recognition (VER). The current study examines behavioral and event-related potential (N100, P200, Late Positive Potential [LPP]) indices of VER in autistic and non-autistic youth. Participants (N = 164) completed an emotion recognition task, the Diagnostic Analyses of Nonverbal Accuracy (DANVA-2) which included VER, during EEG recording. The LPP amplitude was larger in response to high intensity VER, and social cognition predicted VER errors. Verbal IQ, not autism, was related to VER errors. An interaction between VER intensity and social communication impairments revealed these impairments were related to larger LPP amplitudes during low intensity VER. Taken together, differences in VER may be due to higher order cognitive processes, not basic, early perception (N100, P200), and verbal cognitive abilities may underlie behavioral, yet occlude neural, differences in VER processing.

Can Natural Speech Prosody Distinguish Autism Spectrum Disorders? A Meta-Analysis

Natural speech plays a pivotal role in communication and interactions between human beings. The prosody of natural speech, due to its high ecological validity and sensitivity, has been acoustically analyzed and more recently utilized in machine learning to identify individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). In this meta-analysis, we evaluated the findings of empirical studies on acoustic analysis and machine learning techniques to provide statistically supporting evidence for adopting natural speech prosody for ASD detection. Using a random-effects model, the results observed moderate-to-large pooled effect sizes for pitch-related parameters in distinguishing individuals with ASD from their typically developing (TD) counterparts. Specifically, the standardized mean difference (SMD) values for pitch mean, pitch range, pitch standard deviation, and pitch variability were 0.3528, 0.6744, 0.5735, and 0.5137, respectively. However, the differences between the two groups in temporal features could be unreliable, as the SMD values for duration and speech rate were only 0.0738 and -0.0547. Moderator analysis indicated task types were unlikely to influence the final results, whereas age groups showed a moderating role in pooling pitch range differences. Furthermore, promising accuracy rates on ASD identification were shown in our analysis of multivariate machine learning studies, indicating averaged sensitivity and specificity of 75.51% and 80.31%, respectively. In conclusion, these findings shed light on the efficacy of natural prosody in identifying ASD and offer insights for future investigations in this line of research.

Disentangling Language Disorder and Bilingualism in Children with Developmental Language Disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorder: Evidence from Writing

Twenty-eight Albanian-Greek bilingual children with Developmental Language Disorder and 28 children with Autism Spectrum Disorder but no language impairment, along with 28 typically-developing, age-, Performance IQ- and socioeconomic status-matched bilingual children were asked to produce two expository texts which were coded for spelling (phonological, grammatical, orthographic) errors, stress and punctuation use. The children's expressive vocabulary, current language use and home language history were also measured. The results show that the bilingual children with Developmental Language Disorder were particularly vulnerable to spelling errors, while their bilingual peers with Autism Spectrum Disorder were rather challenged by stress and punctuation. The evidence speaks in favor of distinct patterns of writing impairment across the bilingual children with Developmental Language Disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Automated extraction of speech and turn-taking parameters in autism allows for diagnostic classification using a multivariable prediction model

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is diagnosed on the basis of speech and communication differences, amongst other symptoms. Since conversations are essential for building connections with others, it is important to understand the exact nature of differences between autistic and non-autistic verbal behaviour and evaluate the potential of these differences for diagnostics. In this study, we recorded dyadic conversations and used automated extraction of speech and interactional turn-taking features of 54 non-autistic and 26 autistic participants. The extracted speech and turn-taking parameters showed high potential as a diagnostic marker. A linear support vector machine was able to predict the dyad type with 76.2% balanced accuracy (sensitivity: 73.8%, specificity: 78.6%), suggesting that digitally assisted diagnostics could significantly enhance the current clinical diagnostic process due to their objectivity and scalability. In group comparisons on the individual and dyadic level, we found that autistic interaction partners talked slower and in a more monotonous manner than non-autistic interaction partners and that mixed dyads consisting of an autistic and a non-autistic participant had increased periods of silence, and the intensity, i.e. loudness, of their speech was more synchronous.

Syntactic and affective prosody recognition: Schizophrenia vs. Autism spectrum disorders

Patients with a recent diagnosis of schizophrenia and individuals receiving a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder without accompanying intellectual impairment (ASD w/o intellectual impairment) during their adulthood share several clinical characteristics. Exploring under-investigated aspects of these two clinical conditions may shed light on their possible connection and facilitate differential diagnosis at very early stages. To this end, we explored the ability of 15 adults with a recent diagnosis of schizophrenia, 15 individuals diagnosed with ASD w/o intellectual impairment as adults, and 15 healthy adults to resolve sentence ambiguities with the use of syntactic prosody, and to decode happiness, anger, sadness, surprise, fear, and neutrality based on affective prosody. Results revealed intact perception of syntactic prosody in adults with schizophrenia, but impaired affective prosody recognition, which could be attributed, however, to emotion processing difficulties overall. On the other hand, individuals with ASD w/o intellectual impairment were impaired on prosody comprehension per se, as evidenced in the most challenging conditions, namely the subject-reading condition and the emotion of surprise. The differences in prosody comprehension ability between the two clinical conditions may serve as an indicator, among other signs, during the diagnostic evaluation.

Prosodic signatures of ASD severity and developmental delay in preschoolers

Atypical prosody in speech production is a core feature of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) that can impact everyday life communication. Because the ability to modulate prosody develops around the age of speech acquisition, it might be affected by ASD symptoms and developmental delays that emerge at the same period. Here, we investigated the existence of a prosodic signature of developmental level and ASD symptom severity in a sample of 74 autistic preschoolers. We first developed an original diarization pipeline to extract preschoolers' vocalizations from recordings of naturalistic social interactions. Using this novel approach, we then found a robust voice quality signature of ASD developmental difficulties in preschoolers. Furthermore, some prosodic measures were associated with one year later outcome in participants who had not acquired speech yet. Altogether, our results highlight the potential benefits of automatized diarization algorithms and prosodic metrics for digital phenotyping in psychiatry, helping clinicians establish early diagnosis and prognosis.

Oromotor skills in autism spectrum disorder: A scoping review

Oromotor functioning plays a foundational role in spoken communication and feeding, two areas of significant difficulty for many autistic individuals. However, despite years of research and established differences in gross and fine motor skills in this population, there is currently no clear consensus regarding the presence or nature of oral motor control deficits in autistic individuals. In this scoping review, we summarize research published between 1994 and 2022 to answer the following research questions: (1) What methods have been used to investigate oromotor functioning in autistic individuals? (2) Which oromotor behaviors have been investigated in this population? and (3) What conclusions can be drawn regarding oromotor skills in this population? Seven online databases were searched resulting in 107 studies meeting our inclusion criteria. Included studies varied widely in sample characteristics, behaviors analyzed, and research methodology. The large majority (81%) of included studies report a significant oromotor abnormality related to speech production, nonspeech oromotor skills, or feeding within a sample of autistic individuals based on age norms or in comparison to a control group. We examine these findings to identify trends, address methodological aspects hindering cross-study synthesis and generalization, and provide suggestions for future research.

Impairments in recognition of emotional facial expressions, affective prosody, and multisensory facilitation of response time in high-functioning autism

Introduction

Deficits in emotional perception are common in autistic people, but it remains unclear to which extent these perceptual impairments are linked to specific sensory modalities, specific emotions or multisensory facilitation.

Methods

This study aimed to investigate uni- and bimodal perception of emotional cues as well as multisensory facilitation in autistic (n = 18, mean age: 36.72 years, SD: 11.36) compared to non-autistic (n = 18, mean age: 36.41 years, SD: 12.18) people using auditory, visual and audiovisual stimuli.

Results

Lower identification accuracy and longer response time were revealed in high-functioning autistic people. These differences were independent of modality and emotion and showed large effect sizes (Cohen's d 0.8-1.2). Furthermore, multisensory facilitation of response time was observed in non-autistic people that was absent in autistic people, whereas no differences were found in multisensory facilitation of accuracy between the two groups.

Discussion

These findings suggest that processing of auditory and visual components of audiovisual stimuli is carried out more separately in autistic individuals (with equivalent temporal demands required for processing of the respective unimodal cues), but still with similar relative improvement in accuracy, whereas earlier integrative multimodal merging of stimulus properties seems to occur in non-autistic individuals.

Receptive and expressive lexical stress in adolescents with autism

Purpose: Lexical stress abilities were investigated in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) compared to typically developing (TD) controls. We hypothesised that individuals with ASD would demonstrate atypical prosody on lexical and phrase stress tasks and are perceived by listeners as sounding unnatural.Method: A between-group study was conducted to investigate lexical stress abilities among adolescents (12-20 years) with ASD (n = 11) compared to TD controls (n = 11) matched for age and gender. Two tasks were administered to assess the ability to receptively and expressively distinguish nouns from verbs and a noun phrase from a compound noun. Receptive tasks required participants to select visual stimuli corresponding with the utterance they heard. Expressive tasks were rated using perceptual judgments of accuracy, perceptual and acoustic measurements of duration and perceptual ratings of "naturalness."Result: Individuals with ASD performed with significantly less accuracy on all prosody tasks, significantly longer duration of utterances, and were rated as sounding "unnatural" at a significantly higher rate than controls.Conclusion: This study provides converging evidence that supports atypical prosody is influenced by longer duration of utterances and less accurate lexical and phrase stress. The clinical implications of this study support early assessment and intervention of prosodic disorders in ASD.

Atypical patterns of tone production in tone-language-speaking children with autism

Speakers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are found to exhibit atypical pitch patterns in speech production. However, little is known about the production of lexical tones (T1, T2, T3, T4) as well as neutral tones (T1N, T2N, T3N, T4N) by tone-language speakers with ASD. Thus, this study investigated the height and shape of tones produced by Mandarin-speaking children with ASD and their age-matched typically developing (TD) peers. A pronunciation experiment was conducted in which the participants were asked to produce reduplicated nouns. The findings from the acoustic analyses showed that although ASD children generally produced both lexical tones and neutral tones with distinct tonal contours, there were significant differences between the ASD and TD groups for tone height and shape for T1/T1N, T3/T3N, and T4/T4N. However, we did not find any difference in T2/T2N. These data implied that the atypical acoustic pattern in the ASD group could be partially due to the suppression of the F0 range. Moreover, we found that ASD children tended to produce more errors for T2/T2N, T3/T3N than for T1/T1N, T4/T4N. The pattern of tone errors could be explained by the acquisition principle of pitch, similarities among different tones, and tone sandhi. We thus concluded that deficits in pitch processing could be responsible for the atypical tone pattern of ASD children, and speculated that the atypical tonal contours might also be due to imitation deficits. The present findings may eventually help enhance the comprehensive understanding of the representation of atypical pitch patterns in ASD across languages.

Strong Relationship Between Rapid Auditory Processing and Affective Prosody Recognition Among Adults with High Autistic Traits

This study investigated whether individuals with high autistic traits rely on psychoacoustic abilities in affective prosody recognition (APR). In 94 college students, Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) and psychoacoustic abilities were measured. Results indicated that higher AQ, higher rapid auditory processing (RAP), and maleness were associated with a lower APR accuracy for low-intensity prosodies. There was a strong positive association between RAP and APR for participants with high AQ, whereas low-AQ participants showed no such pattern. The findings suggest a reliance on psychoacoustic abilities as compensatory mechanism for deficits in higher-order processing of emotional signals in social interactions, and imply potential benefits of auditory interventions in improving APR among individuals with high autistic traits.

Combining voice and language features improves automated autism detection

Variability in expressive and receptive language, difficulty with pragmatic language, and prosodic difficulties are all features of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Quantifying language and voice characteristics is an important step for measuring outcomes for autistic people, yet clinical measurement is cumbersome and costly. Using natural language processing (NLP) methods and a harmonic model of speech, we analyzed language transcripts and audio recordings to automatically classify individuals as ASD or non-ASD. One-hundred fifty-eight participants (88 ASD, 70 non-ASD) ages 7 to 17 were evaluated with the autism diagnostic observation schedule (ADOS-2), module 3. The ADOS-2 was transcribed following modified SALT guidelines. Seven automated language measures (ALMs) and 10 automated voice measures (AVMs) for each participant were generated from the transcripts and audio of one ADOS-2 task. The measures were analyzed using support vector machine (SVM; a binary classifier) and receiver operating characteristic (ROC). The AVM model resulted in an ROC area under the curve (AUC) of 0.7800, the ALM model an AUC of 0.8748, and the combined model a significantly improved AUC of 0.9205. The ALM model better detected ASD participants who were younger and had lower language skills and shorter activity time. ASD participants detected by the AVM model had better language profiles than those detected by the language model. In combination, automated measurement of language and voice characteristics successfully differentiated children with and without autism. This methodology could help design robust outcome measures for future research. LAY SUMMARY: People with autism often struggle with communication differences which traditional clinical measures and language tests cannot fully capture. Using language transcripts and audio recordings from 158 children ages 7 to 17, we showed that automated, objective language and voice measurements successfully predict the child's diagnosis. This methodology could help design improved outcome measures for research.

An Examination of Articulatory Precision in Autistic Children and Adults

PURPOSE

According to the speech attunement framework, autistic individuals lack the ability and/or motivation to "tune up" their speech to the same level of precision as their neurotypical peers. However, previous studies exploring the articulatory patterns of autistic individuals have yielded disparate findings. One reason contrasting conclusions exist may be because studies have relied on perceptual measures of articulation. Here, we use an objective acoustic measure of articulatory precision to explore the articulatory patterns of autistic children and adults.

METHOD

This was a retrospective analysis of an existing corpus of 900 recorded speech samples taken from 30 adult and 30 child participants across two different population groups: autistic individuals (autism spectrum disorder [ASD] group) and neurotypical individuals (neurotypical [NT] group). Articulatory precision scores were calculated using an automated metric that compares observed acoustics to the expected acoustics for each phoneme production. Linear mixed-effects models were used to compare the articulatory precision scores across population group (i.e., ASD group vs. NT group) and to see if these differences were moderated by age group (i.e., children vs. adult).

RESULTS

The speech of autistic individuals was characterized by reduced articulatory precision relative to their neurotypical peers. This pattern was not significantly moderated by age, indicating it occurred in both the children and adult groups.

CONCLUSIONS

Our preliminary findings indicate that imprecise articulation may be a characteristic of the speech of autistic individuals in both childhood and adulthood. These findings are in line with predictions posited by the speech attunement framework. Given the current lack of speech markers for this clinical population and the importance of speech quality in the social integration of autistic individuals, our results advance articulatory precision as a viable and important target for future research.

Seeing is Disliking: Evidence of Bias Against Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder in Traditional Job Interviews

Job interviews are an integral component of the hiring process in most fields. Our research examines job interview performance of those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) compared to neurotypical (NT) individuals. ASD and NT individuals were taped engaging in mock job interviews. Candidates were rated on a variety of dimensions by respondents who either watched the interview videos or read the interview transcripts and were naïve to the neurodiversity of the interviewees. NT candidates outperformed ASD candidates in the video condition, but in the absence of visual and social cues (transcript condition), individuals with ASD outperformed NT candidates. Our findings suggest that social style significantly influences hiring decisions in traditional job interviews and may bias evaluators against otherwise qualified candidates.

Distinctive prosodic features of people with autism spectrum disorder: a systematic review and meta-analysis study

In this systematic review, we analyzed and evaluated the findings of studies on prosodic features of vocal productions of people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in order to recognize the statistically significant, most confirmed and reliable prosodic differences distinguishing people with ASD from typically developing individuals. Using suitable keywords, three major databases including Web of Science, PubMed and Scopus, were searched. The results for prosodic features such as mean pitch, pitch range and variability, speech rate, intensity and voice duration were extracted from eligible studies. The pooled standard mean difference between ASD and control groups was extracted or calculated. Using I2 statistic and Cochrane Q-test, between-study heterogeneity was evaluated. Furthermore, publication bias was assessed using funnel plot and its significance was evaluated using Egger's and Begg's tests. Thirty-nine eligible studies were retrieved (including 910 and 850 participants for ASD and control groups, respectively). This systematic review and meta-analysis showed that ASD group members had a significantly larger mean pitch (SMD =  - 0.4, 95% CI [- 0.70, - 0.10]), larger pitch range (SMD =  - 0.78, 95% CI [- 1.34, - 0.21]), longer voice duration (SMD =  - 0.43, 95% CI [- 0.72, - 0.15]), and larger pitch variability (SMD = - 0.46, 95% CI [- 0.84, - 0.08]), compared with typically developing control group. However, no significant differences in pitch standard deviation, voice intensity and speech rate were found between groups. Chronological age of participants and voice elicitation tasks were two sources of between-study heterogeneity. Furthermore, no publication bias was observed during analyses (p > 0.05). Mean pitch, pitch range, pitch variability and voice duration were recognized as the prosodic features reliably distinguishing people with ASD from TD individuals.

Recognition of affective prosody in autism spectrum conditions: A systematic review and meta-analysis

LAY ABSTRACT

Differences in understanding others' emotions and attitudes through features in speech (e.g. intonation) have been observed in individuals with autism spectrum conditions, which contribute greatly to their social communication challenges. However, some studies reported that individuals with autism spectrum condition performed comparably to typically developing individuals on affective prosody recognition. Here, we provide a comprehensive review with statistical analysis of 23 existing studies on this topic to examine potential factors that could explain the discrepancies. Compared with typically developing individuals, autism spectrum condition participants generally appeared to encounter more difficulties in affective prosody recognition. But this finding was likely due to the tendency of the existing research to overly focus on deficits in autism. The affective prosody recognition performance in individuals with autism spectrum condition was closely related to the number of answer options offered to them. Moreover, the degree of difficulty in affective prosody recognition encountered by individuals with autism spectrum condition varied across emotions. The findings of this systematic review highlighted the need for further research on affective prosody recognition in autism (e.g. studies that include tonal language speakers and autism spectrum condition individuals with lower cognitive or verbal abilities).

Conversational correlates of rapid social judgments of children and adolescents with and without ASD

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by deficits in social communication, and even children with ASD with preserved language are often perceived as socially awkward. We ask if linguistic patterns are associated with social perceptions of speakers. Twenty-one adolescents with ASD participated in conversations with an adult; each conversation was then rated for the social dimensions of likability, outgoingness, social skilfulness, responsiveness, and fluency. Conversations were analysed for responses to questions, pauses, and acoustic variables. Wide intonation ranges and more pauses within children's own conversational turn were predictors of more positive social ratings while failure to respond to one's conversational partner, faster syllable rate, and smaller quantity of speech were negative predictors of social perceptions.

A meta-analysis of prosody in autism, Williams syndrome, and Down syndrome

Prosody, the rhythm and melody of speech, is an important component of effective communication, and it is an area of difficulty for many populations who struggle with communication. This paper is a meta-analysis of nine studies (and two sets of unpublished data) that assessed prosody using the Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech-Communication (PEPS-C; Peppé & McCann, 2003) in autism spectrum disorder, Williams syndrome, and Down syndrome. Our original goal was to include studies involving any neurodevelopmental disorder that is commonly associated with intellectual disability, yet our systematic search, which included three databases (i.e., PsychInfo, ERIC, and PubMed), only identified studies involving these three groups. To be included in the meta-analysis, studies had to include a group (n ≥ 3 participants) with a neurodevelopmental disorder commonly associated with intellectual disability and a typically developing comparison group matched on chronological age, nonverbal abilities, or verbal abilities. Studies also needed to report original data using the PEPS-C and be available in English. Study quality was assessed using a checklist adapted from Downes et al. (2016). Results revealed that prosodic form was a weakness for each etiology, while unique patterns of strengths and weaknesses were evident for prosodic functions. Groups with autism (n = 5), all classified as high-functioning or with Asperger's syndrome, exhibited weakness in emotional affect but some relative strengths with turn-end and focus tasks. Groups with Williams syndrome (n = 4) demonstrated weaknesses on phrase/sentence-level tasks and relative strengths on word-level tasks. Groups with Down syndrome (n = 2) had the greatest difficulty overall, though performance was better on receptive (vs. expressive) function tasks. By combining studies and related subtasks of the PEPS-C, we are able to more confidently generalize findings for each population and identify targets for intervention. However, given the limited number of studies identified, this paper also highlights the need for more research on prosody in intellectual disability.

Lifelong Tone Language Experience does not Eliminate Deficits in Neural Encoding of Pitch in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Atypical pitch processing is a feature of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), which affects non-tone language speakers' communication. Lifelong auditory experience has been demonstrated to modify genetically-predisposed risks for pitch processing. We examined individuals with ASD to test the hypothesis that lifelong auditory experience in tone language may eliminate impaired pitch processing in ASD. We examined children's and adults' Frequency-following Response (FFR), a neurophysiological component indexing early neural sensory encoding of pitch. Univariate and machine-learning-based analytics suggest less robust pitch encoding and diminished pitch distinctions in the FFR from individuals with ASD. Contrary to our hypothesis, results point to a linguistic pitch encoding impairment associated with ASD that may not be eliminated even by lifelong sensory experience.

Emotional prosody recognition in children with high-functioning autism under the influence of emotional intensity: Based on the perspective of emotional dimension theory

This paper investigated the ability of Mandarin-speaking children with high-functioning autism (HFA) to recognize the four categories of emotional prosody, namely, happiness, anger, sadness and fear, in moderate- and high-intensity emotional conditions using auditory discrimination tasks. Thirty-four children with HFA between 5 and 7 years of age and 34 typically developing (TD) controls participated in this study. In moderate-intensity conditions, children with HFA scored lower than TD children in the recognition of the four categories of emotional prosody, indicating an overall impairment. With an increase in the intensity of emotion, children with HFA showed improved accuracy for anger, decreased accuracy for happiness, but no change in accuracy for either sadness or fear. An analysis of error patterns demonstrated that unlike TD children, children with HFA were inclined to mistake happiness for anger, with the two categories differing in valence, and this inclination deepened as the intensity increased. In discriminating between sadness and fear, which have a slight arousal difference, both groups showed difficulty in moderate-intensity conditions. In high-intensity conditions, TD children were inclined to perceive stimuli as exhibiting fear, which demonstrates comparatively high arousal; thus, they were more accurate for fear, while HFA children were not sensitive to increases in arousal, showing no noticeable effect. These findings indicated that children with HFA have a mechanism distinct from that of TD children in emotional prosody recognition, exhibiting various degrees of impairment in this regard.

Temporal Coordination and Prosodic Structure in Autism Spectrum Disorder: Timing Across Speech and Non-speech Motor Domains

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often exhibit disordered speech prosody, but sources of disordered prosody remain poorly understood. We explored patterns of temporal alignment and prosodic grouping in a speech-based metronome repetition task as well as manual coordination in a drum tapping task among Cantonese speakers with ASD and normal nonverbal IQ and matched controls. Results indicate similar group results for prosodic grouping patterns, but significant differences in relative timing and longer syllable durations at phrase ends for the ASD group. Variability on the speech task was significantly correlated with variability on the drumming task, consistent with the view that impairment in both speech and non-speech motor domains can be linked with deficits in temporal processing.

Prosodic Entrainment in Conversations of Verbal Children and Teens on the Autism Spectrum

Unusual speech prosody has long been recognized as a characteristic feature of the speech of individuals diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). However, research to determine the exact nature of this difference in speech prosody is still ongoing. Many individuals with verbal autism perform well on tasks testing speech prosody. Nonetheless, their expressive prosody is judged to be unusual by others. We propose that one aspect of this perceived difference in speech prosody in individuals with ASD may be due to a deficit in the ability to entrain-or become more similar-to their conversation partners in prosodic features over the course of a conversation. In order to investigate this hypothesis, 24 children and teens between the ages of 9 and 15 years participated in our study. Twelve of the participants had previously been diagnosed with ASD and the other 12 participants were matched to the ASD participants in age, gender, and non-verbal IQ scores. All participants completed a goal-directed conversation task, which was subsequently analyzed acoustically. Our results suggest (1) that youth diagnosed with ASD entrain less to their conversation partners compared to their neurotypical peers-in fact, children and teens diagnosed with ASD tend to dis-entrain from their conversation partners while their neurotypical peers tend to converge to their conversation partners' prosodic features. (2) Although age interacts differently with prosodic entrainment in youth with and without ASD, this difference is attributable to the entrainment behavior of the conversation partners rather than to those with ASD. (3) Better language skill is negatively correlated with prosodic entrainment for both youth with and without ASD. The observed differences in prosodic entrainment in children and teens with ASD may not only contribute to the perceived unusual prosody in youth with ASD but are also likely to be indicative of their difficulties in social communication, which constitutes a core challenge for individuals with ASD.

Knowledge and Awareness of Ear Protection Devices for Sound Sensitivity by Individuals With Autism Spectrum Disorders

Purpose Sensitivity to sounds and atypical reactions to sensory input by individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have been reported in the literature. In response to this sensitivity, some individuals use ear protection devices (EPDs) such as noise-canceling headphones, earplugs, or earmuffs to attenuate the perceived unpleasant sounds. Given the communication deficits often noted in this population and the essential role of hearing in speech and language development, the impact of wearing EPDs to attenuate sound needs to be explored. The purpose of this study was to obtain information from various stakeholders regarding their opinions about use of EPDs in individuals with ASD and perceived benefits and possible concerns of EPD use. Method A survey was constructed to assess the opinions of speech-language pathologists, audiologists, teachers, and graduate students about EPDs among individuals with ASD. A total of 255 professionals and graduate students completed the survey. Results The vast majority of respondents indicated a level of awareness of EPDs within this population. Regarding observed use of such devices, the majority of participants (66%) reported observing individuals with ASD using EPDs. The most commonly used devices observed were headphones (91%), followed by earmuffs (44%) and earplugs (33%). Respondents who had experience recommending and/or using EPDs with individuals with ASD were asked to report on major reasons why the devices were used and the perceived benefits and possible negative effects. Conclusions There appears to be uncertainty among various stakeholders of the benefits and possible negative effects of EPD use by individuals with ASD. Additionally, there is a dearth of research in this area, and the necessity for specific guidelines for recommending and monitoring EPD use is indicated.

Leveraging Linguistic Context in Dyadic Interactions to Improve Automatic Speech Recognition for Children

Automatic speech recognition for child speech has been long considered a more challenging problem than for adult speech. Various contributing factors have been identified such as larger acoustic speech variability including mispronunciations due to continuing biological changes in growth, developing vocabulary and linguistic skills, and scarcity of training corpora. A further challenge arises when dealing with spontaneous speech of children involved in a conversational interaction, and especially when the child may have limited or impaired communication ability. This includes health applications, one of the motivating domains of this paper, that involve goal-oriented dyadic interactions between a child and clinician/adult social partner as a part of behavioral assessment. In this work, we use linguistic context information from the interaction to adapt speech recognition models for children speech. Specifically, spoken language from the interacting adult speech provides the context for the child's speech. We propose two methods to exploit this context: lexical repetitions and semantic response generation. For the latter, we make use of sequence-to-sequence models that learn to predict the target child utterance given context adult utterances. Long-term context is incorporated in the model by propagating the cell-state across the duration of conversation. We use interpolation techniques to adapt language models at the utterance level, and analyze the effect of length and direction of context (forward and backward). Two different domains are used in our experiments to demonstrate the generalized nature of our methods - interactions between a child with ASD and an adult social partner in a play-based, naturalistic setting, and in forensic interviews between a child and a trained interviewer. In both cases, context-adapted models yield significant improvement (upto 10.71% in absolute word error rate) over the baseline and perform consistently across context windows and directions. Using statistical analysis, we investigate the effect of source-based (adult) and target-based (child) factors on adaptation methods. Our results demonstrate the applicability of our modeling approach in improving child speech recognition by employing information transfer from the adult interlocutor.

Quantification of speech and synchrony in the conversation of adults with autism spectrum disorder

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a highly prevalent neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impairments in social reciprocity and communication together with restricted interest and stereotyped behaviors. The Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) is considered a ‘gold standard’ instrument for diagnosis of ASD and mainly depends on subjective assessments made by trained clinicians. To develop a quantitative and objective surrogate marker for ASD symptoms, we investigated speech features including F₀, speech rate, speaking time, and turn-taking gaps, extracted from footage recorded during a semi-structured socially interactive situation from ADOS. We calculated not only the statistic values in a whole session of the ADOS activity but also conducted a block analysis, computing the statistical values of the prosodic features in each 8s sliding window. The block analysis identified whether participants changed volume or pitch according to the flow of the conversation. We also measured the synchrony between the participant and the ADOS administrator. Participants with high-functioning ASD showed significantly longer turn-taking gaps and a greater proportion of pause time, less variability and less synchronous changes in blockwise mean of intensity compared with those with typical development (TD) (p<0.05 corrected). In addition, the ASD group had significantly wider distribution than the TD group in the within-participant variability of blockwise mean of log F₀ (p<0.05 corrected). The clinical diagnosis could be discriminated using the speech features with 89% accuracy. The features of turn-taking and pausing were significantly correlated with deficits of ASD in reciprocity (p<0.05 corrected). Additionally, regression analysis provided 1.35 of mean absolute error in the prediction of deficits in reciprocity, to which the synchrony of intensity especially contributed. The findings suggest that considering variance of speech features, interaction and synchrony with conversation partner are critical to characterize atypical features in the conversation of people with ASD.

Cross-Modal Coordination of Face-Directed Gaze and Emotional Speech Production in School-Aged Children and Adolescents with ASD

Autism spectrum disorder involves persistent difficulties in social communication. Although these difficulties affect both verbal and nonverbal communication, there are no quantitative behavioral studies to date investigating the cross-modal coordination of verbal and nonverbal communication in autism. The objective of the present study was to characterize the dynamic relation between speech production and facial expression in children with autism and to establish how face-directed gaze modulates this cross-modal coordination. In a dynamic mimicry task, experiment participants watched and repeated neutral and emotional spoken sentences with accompanying facial expressions. Analysis of audio and motion capture data quantified cross-modal coordination between simultaneous speech production and facial expression. Whereas neurotypical children produced emotional sentences with strong cross-modal coordination and produced neutral sentences with weak cross-modal coordination, autistic children produced similar levels of cross-modal coordination for both neutral and emotional sentences. An eyetracking analysis revealed that cross-modal coordination of speech production and facial expression was greater when the neurotypical child spent more time looking at the face, but weaker when the autistic child spent more time looking at the face. In sum, social communication difficulties in autism spectrum disorder may involve deficits in cross-modal coordination. This finding may inform how autistic individuals are perceived in their daily conversations.

Cross-modal emotion recognition and autism-like traits in typically developing children

The ability to explicitly recognize emotions develops gradually throughout childhood, and children usually have greater difficulty in recognizing emotions from the voice than from the face. However, little is known about how children integrate vocal and facial cues to recognize an emotion, particularly during mid to late childhood. Furthermore, children with an autism spectrum disorder often show a reduced ability to recognize emotions, especially when integrating emotion from multiple modalities. The current preliminary study explored the ability of typically developing children aged 7-9 years to match emotional tones of voice to facial expressions and whether this ability varies according to the level of autism-like traits. Overall, children were the least accurate when matching happy and fearful voices to faces, commonly pairing happy voices with angry faces and fearful voices with sad faces. However, the level of autism-like traits was not associated with matching accuracy. These results suggest that 7- to 9-year-old children have difficulty in integrating vocal and facial emotional expressions but that differences in cross-modal emotion matching in relation to the broader autism phenotype are not evident in this task for this age group with the current sample.

Perceptions of self and other: Social judgments and gaze patterns to videos of adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorder

Neurotypical adults often form negative first impressions of individuals with autism spectrum disorder and are less interested in engaging with them socially. In contrast, individuals with autism spectrum disorder actively seek out the company of others who share their diagnosis. It is not clear, however, whether individuals with autism spectrum disorder form more positive first impressions of autistic peers when diagnosis is not explicitly shared. We asked adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorder to watch brief video clips of adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorder and answer questions about their impressions of the individuals in the videos. Questions were related to participants' perceptions of the social skills of the individuals in the video, as well as their own willingness to interact with that person. We also measured gaze patterns to the faces, eyes, and mouths of adolescents in the video stimuli. Both participant groups spent less time gazing at videos of autistic adolescents. Regardless of diagnostic group, all participants provided more negative judgments of autistic than neurotypical adolescents in the videos. These data indicate that, without being explicitly informed of a shared diagnosis, adolescents with autism spectrum disorder form negative first impressions of autistic adolescents that are similar to, or lower than, those formed by neurotypical peers.

Pushing the Envelope: Developments in Neural Entrainment to Speech and the Biological Underpinnings of Prosody Perception

Prosodic cues in speech are indispensable for comprehending a speaker’s message, recognizing emphasis and emotion, parsing segmental units, and disambiguating syntactic structures. While it is commonly accepted that prosody provides a fundamental service to higher-level features of speech, the neural underpinnings of prosody processing are not clearly defined in the cognitive neuroscience literature. Many recent electrophysiological studies have examined speech comprehension by measuring neural entrainment to the speech amplitude envelope, using a variety of methods including phase-locking algorithms and stimulus reconstruction. Here we review recent evidence for neural tracking of the speech envelope and demonstrate the importance of prosodic contributions to the neural tracking of speech. Prosodic cues may offer a foundation for supporting neural synchronization to the speech envelope, which scaffolds linguistic processing. We argue that prosody has an inherent role in speech perception, and future research should fill the gap in our knowledge of how prosody contributes to speech envelope entrainment.

An acoustic study of lexical stress contrastivity in children with and without autism spectrum disorders

In this exploratory study, we examined stress contrastivity within real word productions elicited via picture naming in 20 children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and 20 typical peers group-wise matched on age and vocabulary. Targets had a dominant pattern of lexical stress beginning with a strong-weak pattern (SW: 'caterpillar', 'butterfly') or a non-dominant pattern of lexical stress beginning with a weak-strong pattern (WS: 'tomato', 'potato'). Children produced each target twice (n = 320 productions). Acoustic measures were made for the duration, fundamental frequency, and intensity of the first two vowels for each word production. For vowel duration and fundamental frequency, children with ASD and typical peers produced a similar magnitude of stress contrastivity for SW and WS words. However, there was a significant group difference in the way contrastivity in intensity was realised for WS words whereby children with ASD produced less stress contrastivity than typical peers. Bayesian analyses were in line with our interpretation of our frequentist analyses.

Generalization of content and emotional prosody across speakers varying in gender in youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder

AIMS

We employed a discrimination-choice procedure, embedded in a custom-made videogame, to evaluate whether youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), including nonverbal individuals, distinguish sentences on the basis of emotional tone-of-voice and generalize linguistic information across speaker gender.

METHODS AND PROCEDURES

Thirteen youth with ASD (7-21 years) and 13 age-matched typical controls heard pairs of pre-recorded sentences varying in lexical content and prosody (e.g., enthusiastic "Dave rode a bike'' vs. grouchy "Mark held a key''). After training to select a target sentence, participants heard test probes comprising re-combinations of the content and prosodic features of the sentences. Interspersed generalization trials used a voice opposite in gender to the voice used in training.

OUTCOMES AND RESULTS

Youth with ASD were less accurate than controls in discriminating sentences based on emotional tone-of-voice. Nonverbal and verbal youth did not differ in this regard. The ASD group showed only slight decrements in generalizing to the opposite-gender voice.

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

The finding of intact generalization of linguistic information across male/female speakers contrasts with the widely held view that autism is characterized by deficits in generalization. This suggests the need to test generalization under varying task demands to identify limits on performance.

Neural evidence for reduced automaticity in processing emotional prosody among men with high levels of autistic traits

This study aimed to examine individual differences in the integration of emotional prosody when processing semantic meaning in speech among men with high and low levels of autistic traits, as measured by the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ). The behavioral and neural responses of high- and low-AQ men during semantic valence judgment were compared. The stimuli were positive or negative words spoken with either happy or sad prosody; in other words, the prosody was either congruous or incongruous to the valence of meaning. Participants were required to judge the (positive vs. negative) valence of word meaning as accurately and as quickly as possible while ignoring emotional prosody. Behavioral results showed that high-AQ men responded significantly more slowly than low-AQ men in all stimulus conditions, indicating lower automaticity in processing emotional speech. Neural data revealed that low-AQ men (but not high-AQ men) had significantly increased N200 and N400 amplitudes for incongruous (compared to congruous) stimuli spoken with happy prosody. Our findings supported our hypotheses that high levels of autistic traits are associated with reduced behavioral automaticity and less differential neural resources allocated to processing emotional speech stimuli with different cognitive demands.

Emotional prosodic change detection in autism Spectrum disorder: an electrophysiological investigation in children and adults

Background

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by atypical behaviors in social environments and in reaction to changing events. While this dyad of symptoms is at the core of the pathology along with atypical sensory behaviors, most studies have investigated only one dimension. A focus on the sameness dimension has shown that intolerance to change is related to an atypical pre-attentional detection of irregularity. In the present study, we addressed the same process in response to emotional change in order to evaluate the interplay between alterations of change detection and socio-emotional processing in children and adults with autism.

Methods

Brain responses to neutral and emotional prosodic deviancies (mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3a, reflecting change detection and orientation of attention toward change, respectively) were recorded in children and adults with autism and in controls. Comparison of neutral and emotional conditions allowed distinguishing between general deviancy and emotional deviancy effects. Moreover, brain responses to the same neutral and emotional stimuli were recorded when they were not deviants to evaluate the sensory processing of these vocal stimuli.

Results

In controls, change detection was modulated by prosody: in children, this was characterized by a lateralization of emotional MMN to the right hemisphere, and in adults, by an earlier MMN for emotional deviancy than for neutral deviancy. In ASD, an overall atypical change detection was observed with an earlier MMN and a larger P3a compared to controls suggesting an unusual pre-attentional orientation toward any changes in the auditory environment. Moreover, in children with autism, deviancy detection depicted reduced MMN amplitude. In addition in children with autism, contrary to adults with autism, no modulation of the MMN by prosody was present and sensory processing of both neutral and emotional vocal stimuli appeared atypical.

Conclusions

Overall, change detection remains altered in people with autism. However, differences between children and adults with ASD evidence a trend toward normalization of vocal processing and of the automatic detection of emotion deviancy with age.

Atypical perceptual and neural processing of emotional prosodic changes in children with autism spectrum disorders

OBJECTIVE

The present study explored the processing of emotional speech prosody in school-aged children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) but without marked language impairments (children with ASD [no LI]).

METHODS

The mismatch negativity (MMN)/the late discriminative negativity (LDN), reflecting pre-attentive auditory discrimination processes, and the P3a, indexing involuntary orienting to attention-catching changes, were recorded to natural word stimuli uttered with different emotional connotations (neutral, sad, scornful and commanding). Perceptual prosody discrimination was addressed with a behavioral sound-discrimination test.

RESULTS

Overall, children with ASD (no LI) were slower in behaviorally discriminating prosodic features of speech stimuli than typically developed control children. Further, smaller standard-stimulus event related potentials (ERPs) and MMN/LDNs were found in children with ASD (no LI) than in controls. In addition, the amplitude of the P3a was diminished and differentially distributed on the scalp in children with ASD (no LI) than in control children.

CONCLUSIONS

Processing of words and changes in emotional speech prosody is impaired at various levels of information processing in school-aged children with ASD (no LI).

SIGNIFICANCE

The results suggest that low-level speech sound discrimination and orienting deficits might contribute to emotional speech prosody processing impairments observed in ASD.

Enhanced Sensitivity to Angry Voices in People with Features of the Broader Autism Phenotype

The present study examined whether the ability to recognize vocal emotional expressions is negatively related to features of the Broader Autism Phenotype (BAP) in the general population. We assessed 61 typically developing adults on a BAP self-report measure (Broader Autism Phenotype Questionnaire) and a purpose-developed online emotion recognition task for efficient delivery of non-linguistic vocal stimuli corresponding to the six basic emotions. Contrary to expectations, we found that higher self-ratings of rigid BAP traits correlated with better recognition accuracy and higher intensity ratings for angry voices. We interpret this anger-specific association as an advantage for enhanced threat detection in the BAP and discuss this finding in the broader context of personality research and interpersonal theory.

Lay Listener Classification and Evaluation of Typical and Atypical Children's Speech

Verbal children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often also have atypical speech. In the context of the many challenges associated with ASD, do speech sound pattern differences really matter? The current study addressed this question. Structured spontaneous speech was elicited from 34 children: 17 with ASD, whose clinicians reported unusual speech prosody; and 17 typically-developing, age-matched controls. Multiword utterances were excerpted from each child's speech sample and presented to young adult listeners, who had no clinical training or experience. In Experiment 1, listeners classified band pass filtered and unaltered excerpts as "typical" or "disordered". Children with ASD were only distinguished from typical children based on unaltered speech, but the analyses indicated unique contributions from speech sound patterns. In Experiment 2, listeners provided likeability ratings on the filtered and unaltered excerpts. Again, lay listeners only distinguished children with ASD from their typically-developing peers based on unaltered speech, with typical children rated as more likeable than children with ASD. In Experiment 3, listeners evaluated the unaltered speech along several perceptual dimensions. High overlap between the dimensions of articulation, clearness, and fluency was captured by an emergent dimension: intelligibility. This dimension predicted listeners' likeability ratings nearly as well as it predicted their judgments of disorder. Overall, the results show that lay listeners can distinguish atypical from typical children outside the social-interactional context based solely on speech, and that they attend to speech intelligibility to do this. Poor intelligibility also contributes to listeners' negative social evaluation of children, and so merits assessment and remediation.

Exploring the neural correlates of lexical stress perception in english among Chinese-English bilingual children with autism spectrum disorder: An ERP study

Previous studies found that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) were less sensitive to the variations of lexical stress in their native language than typically developing controls. However, no study has been conducted to explore the perception of lexical stress in the second language among individuals with ASD. Using ERPs (event-related potentials) measurement with an oddball paradigm, the current study examined and compared the neural responses by Chinese-English bilingual children with ASD and typically developing controls in the processing of English lexical stress. The results showed that when compared with typically developing controls, children with ASD manifested reduced MMN (mismatch negativity) amplitude at the left temporal-parietal and parietal sites, indicating that they were less sensitive to lexical stress. However, a more negative MMN response was found for ASD group than for typically developing group at the right central-parietal, temporal-parietal, and temporal sites. In addition, the right hemisphere was more activated than the left hemisphere for ASD group, which might be derived from the reversed asymmetry of brain activation for individuals with ASD when processing language-related stimuli.

Evaluation and remediation of central auditory processing disorders in children with autism spectrum disorders

OBJECTIVES

This study was carried out to assess various skills of central auditory processing (CAP) in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and to evaluate the efficacy of auditory training in these children.

METHODS

This study is a non-randomized clinical experiment. 30 high functioning ASD children aged from 7 to 12 years were included in the study. They underwent behavioral assessments of CAP skills with subsequent remediation by dichotic training therapy for the children who revealed dichotic deficits.

RESULTS

Scores of CAP skills in ASD children are wide-ranging from completely normal to substantially defective and generally lower than those of typically developing children. By auditory training, ASD children improved their dichotic deficits as well as other untrained areas of auditory and language processing skills.

CONCLUSIONS

A group of ASD children showed different degrees of abnormalities in CAP that could be measured behaviorally and achieved benefits from auditory training in improving their dichotic listening, auditory and language processing skills.

Comprehension of "Narrow Focus" by Adolescents in the Autism Spectrum

OBJECTIVE

The study compared the performance of adolescents with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) to that of age-matched peers with typical development (TD) and cognitive language-matched peers with TD on measures of identification and comprehension of "narrow focus."

PARTICIPANTS

Forty-nine participants, 17 autistic, 17 TD peers matched for age and sex, and 15 TD children matched for expressive vocabulary participated in the study.

METHOD

The Hebrew Narrow Focus Test (HNFT) was used. The HNFT includes 3 subtests. The first subtest (A) required identification of the stressed word in the sentence based on psychoacoustic abilities alone. The second (B) and third (C) subtests required understanding the meaning of focused stress in different contexts. In subtest B, the meaning of "narrow focus" was to contrast other possibilities related to the lexical-grammatical role of the stressed word in the sentence, whereas in subtest C, the meaning was to indicate a mistake.

RESULTS

ASD participants showed reduced performance compared to peers across all the subtests of the HNFT, but similar performance compared to TD children in subtests A and B and better performance on subtest C. A significant correlation was found between the Raven test for assessing nonverbal intelligence and subtests B and C of the HNFT in the group of adolescents with ASD.

CONCLUSIONS

Comprehension of narrow focus in adolescents with ASD who study in a special educational system is related to their cognitive-linguistic abilities and not to the autistic condition by itself or to its severity.

Language profiles in young children with autism spectrum disorder: A community sample using multiple assessment instruments

This study investigated language profiles in a community-based sample of 104 children aged 1–3 years who had been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder using Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.) diagnostic criteria. Language was assessed with the Mullen scales, Preschool Language Scale, fifth edition, and Vineland-II parent-report. The study aimed to determine whether the receptive-to-expressive language profile is independent from the assessment instrument used, and whether nonverbal cognition, early communicative behaviors, and autism spectrum disorder symptoms predict language scores. Receptive-to-expressive language profiles differed between assessment instruments and reporters, and Preschool Language Scale, fifth edition profiles were also dependent on developmental level. Nonverbal cognition and joint attention significantly predicted receptive language scores, and nonverbal cognition and frequency of vocalizations predicted expressive language scores. These findings support the administration of multiple direct assessment and parent-report instruments when evaluating language in young children with autism spectrum disorder, for both research and in clinical settings. Results also support that joint attention is a useful intervention target for improving receptive language skills in young children with autism spectrum disorder. Future research comparing language profiles of young children with autism spectrum disorder to children with non-autism spectrum disorder developmental delays and typical development will add to our knowledge of early language development in children with autism spectrum disorder.

A Systematic Review of Speech Assessments for Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Recommendations for Best Practice

PURPOSE

The purpose of this systematic review was to provide a summary and evaluation of speech assessments used with children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). A subsequent narrative review was completed to ascertain the core components of an evidence-based pediatric speech assessment, which, together with the results of the systematic review, provide clinical and research guidelines for best practice.

METHOD

A systematic search of eight databases was used to find peer-reviewed research articles published between 1990 and 2014 assessing the speech of children with ASD. Eligible articles were categorized according to the assessment methods used and the speech characteristics described.

RESULTS

The review identified 21 articles that met the inclusion criteria, search criteria, and confidence in ASD diagnosis. The speech of prelinguistic participants was assessed in seven articles. Speech assessments with verbal participants were completed in 15 articles with segmental and suprasegmental aspects of speech analyzed. Assessment methods included connected speech samples, single-word naming tasks, speech imitation tasks, and analysis of the production of words and sentences.

CONCLUSIONS

Clinical and research guidelines for speech assessment of children with ASD are outlined. Future comparisons will be facilitated by the use of consistent reporting methods in research focusing on children with ASD.

Atypical preference for infant-directed speech as an early marker of autism spectrum disorders? A literature review and directions for further research

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) refer to a complex group of neurodevelopmental disorders causing difficulties with communication and interpersonal relationships, as well as restricted and repetitive behaviours and interests. As early identification, diagnosis, and intervention provide better long-term outcomes, early markers of ASD have gained increased research attention. This review examines evidence that auditory processing enhanced by social interest, in particular auditory preference of speech directed towards infants and young children (i.e. infant-directed speech - IDS), may be an early marker of risk for ASD. Although this review provides evidence for IDS preference as, indeed, a potential early marker of ASD, the explanation for differences in IDS processing among children with ASD versus other children remains unclear, as are the implications of these impairments for later social-communicative development. Therefore, it is crucial to explore atypicalities in IDS processing early on development and to understand whether preferential listening to specific types of speech sounds in the first years of life may help to predict the impairments in social and language development.

Neurotypical Peers are Less Willing to Interact with Those with Autism based on Thin Slice Judgments

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), including those who otherwise require less support, face severe difficulties in everyday social interactions. Research in this area has primarily focused on identifying the cognitive and neurological differences that contribute to these social impairments, but social interaction by definition involves more than one person and social difficulties may arise not just from people with ASD themselves, but also from the perceptions, judgments, and social decisions made by those around them. Here, across three studies, we find that first impressions of individuals with ASD made from thin slices of real-world social behavior by typically-developing observers are not only far less favorable across a range of trait judgments compared to controls, but also are associated with reduced intentions to pursue social interaction. These patterns are remarkably robust, occur within seconds, do not change with increased exposure, and persist across both child and adult age groups. However, these biases disappear when impressions are based on conversational content lacking audio-visual cues, suggesting that style, not substance, drives negative impressions of ASD. Collectively, these findings advocate for a broader perspective of social difficulties in ASD that considers both the individual’s impairments and the biases of potential social partners.

Basic and complex emotion recognition in children with autism: cross-cultural findings

BACKGROUND

Children with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) have emotion recognition deficits when tested in different expression modalities (face, voice, body). However, these findings usually focus on basic emotions, using one or two expression modalities. In addition, cultural similarities and differences in emotion recognition patterns in children with ASC have not been explored before. The current study examined the similarities and differences in the recognition of basic and complex emotions by children with ASC and typically developing (TD) controls across three cultures: Israel, Britain, and Sweden.

METHODS

Fifty-five children with high-functioning ASC, aged 5-9, were compared to 58 TD children. On each site, groups were matched on age, sex, and IQ. Children were tested using four tasks, examining recognition of basic and complex emotions from voice recordings, videos of facial and bodily expressions, and emotional video scenarios including all modalities in context.

RESULTS

Compared to their TD peers, children with ASC showed emotion recognition deficits in both basic and complex emotions on all three modalities and their integration in context. Complex emotions were harder to recognize, compared to basic emotions for the entire sample. Cross-cultural agreement was found for all major findings, with minor deviations on the face and body tasks.

CONCLUSIONS

Our findings highlight the multimodal nature of ER deficits in ASC, which exist for basic as well as complex emotions and are relatively stable cross-culturally. Cross-cultural research has the potential to reveal both autism-specific universal deficits and the role that specific cultures play in the way empathy operates in different countries.