Vocal emotion perception in pseudo-sentences by secondary-school children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

There have been inconsistent findings regarding emotion identification abilities in people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Some researchers have found global or emotion-specific impairments, while others have not. The present work reports findings from an experiment testing the ability of children with ASD (primarily Asperger syndrome) to identify basic vocal emotions. Participants identified the emotion present in pseudo-sentences spoken with affective prosody (anger, fear, happiness, sadness). Participants with ASD, at secondary school, showed a modest, non-significant performance deficit compared to typically developing controls. This minor deficit was dependent on a difference in verbal ability. There was no evidence that children with ASD had emotion-specific or valence-specific deficits. By-items correlations showed that stimuli whose emotions were difficult to identify for children with ASD were also difficult to identify for controls, while confusion matrices showed similar error patterns across groups. The results are discussed in relation to the amygdala theory of autism.

► Children with ASD were asked to identify vocal affect from pseudo-sentences.
► ASD children showed modest, non-significant deficits compared to TD controls.
► The modest ASD performance deficit was attributable to verbal ability.
► Children with ASD confused emotions in the same patterns as two controls groups.
► ASD children showed no emotion-specific or valence-specific deficits.