Globerson Eitan, Amir Noam, Kishon-Rabin Liat, Golan Ofer
Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel; Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, Jerusalem, Israel.
Autism Res. 2015 Apr;8(2):153-63. doi: 10.1002/aur.1432. Epub 2014 Nov 26.
Prosody is an important tool of human communication, carrying both affective and pragmatic messages in speech. Prosody recognition relies on processing of acoustic cues, such as the fundamental frequency of the voice signal, and their interpretation according to acquired socioemotional scripts. Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) show deficiencies in affective prosody recognition. These deficiencies have been mostly associated with general difficulties in emotion recognition. The current study explored an additional association between affective prosody recognition in ASD and auditory perceptual abilities. Twenty high-functioning male adults with ASD and 32 typically developing male adults, matched on age and verbal abilities undertook a battery of auditory tasks. These included affective and pragmatic prosody recognition tasks, two psychoacoustic tasks (pitch direction recognition and pitch discrimination), and a facial emotion recognition task, representing nonvocal emotion recognition. Compared with controls, the ASD group demonstrated poorer performance on both vocal and facial emotion recognition, but not on pragmatic prosody recognition or on any of the psychoacoustic tasks. Both groups showed strong associations between psychoacoustic abilities and prosody recognition, both affective and pragmatic, although these were more pronounced in the ASD group. Facial emotion recognition predicted vocal emotion recognition in the ASD group only. These findings suggest that auditory perceptual abilities, alongside general emotion recognition abilities, play a significant role in affective prosody recognition in ASD.
韵律是人类交流的重要工具，在言语中传递情感和语用信息。韵律识别依赖于对声学线索的处理，比如语音信号的基频，并根据习得的社会情感脚本对其进行解读。患有自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）的个体在情感韵律识别方面存在缺陷。这些缺陷大多与情绪识别方面的普遍困难有关。当前的研究探讨了ASD患者情感韵律识别与听觉感知能力之间的另一种关联。20名高功能成年男性ASD患者和32名年龄及语言能力匹配的发育正常成年男性进行了一系列听觉任务。这些任务包括情感和语用韵律识别任务、两项心理声学任务（音高方向识别和音高辨别）以及一项面部情绪识别任务，后者代表非言语情绪识别。与对照组相比，ASD组在语音和面部情绪识别方面表现较差，但在语用韵律识别或任何心理声学任务上表现并无差异。两组在心理声学能力与情感和语用韵律识别之间均表现出强烈关联，尽管在ASD组中这些关联更为明显。面部情绪识别仅能预测ASD组的语音情绪识别。这些发现表明，听觉感知能力与一般情绪识别能力一起，在ASD患者的情感韵律识别中发挥着重要作用。
