Influences of semantic and prosodic cues on word repetition and categorization in autism

To investigate sensitivity to prosodic and semantic cues to emotion in individuals with high-functioning autism (HFA).

Emotional prosody and semantics were independently manipulated to assess the relative influence of prosody versus semantics on speech processing. A sample of 10-year-old typically developing children (n = 10) and children with HFA (n = 10) were asked to repeat words that were either emotionally congruent or incongruent in form and content (Experiment 1A). In a second task (Experiment 1B), the same participants were asked to classify stimuli on the basis of emotional prosody. A final experiment (Experiment 2) focused on sensitivity to congruence in a non-emotional source of variation: talker gender.

The results revealed a selective impairment in spontaneous integration of prosodic and semantic cues to emotion in HFA; however, the same participants were able to categorize emotions on the basis of prosody under reduced task demands. Individuals with HFA were highly sensitive to another surface characteristic in speech: talker gender.

The study reveals impairment in the spontaneous integration of prosodic and semantic cues to emotion in HFA; however, insensitivity to surface detail, such as prosody, in HFA appears to be highly task dependent and selective to the domain of emotion.