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.
Keywords: Emotional dimension; Emotional intensity; Emotional prosody recognition; High-functioning autism.
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