Emotional prosody perception and its association with pragmatic language in school-aged children with high-function autism

• HFA children misidentify happy prosody in emotionally neutral/-relevant utterances.
• HFA children perform similarly to TD children in judging sad and angry prosody.
• HFA children who perceive happy prosody accurately show better social adaptation.
• Improving prosody perception in HFA children might enhance social communication.

Emotional prosody perception is essential for social communication, but it is still an open issue whether children with high-function autism (HFA) exhibit any prosodic perception deficits or experience selective impairments in recognizing the prosody of positive emotions. Moreover, the associations between prosody perception, pragmatic language, and social adaptation in children with HFA have not been fully explored. This study investigated whether emotional prosody perception for words and sentences in children with HFA (n = 25, 6–11 years of age) differed from age-matched, typically developing children (TD, n = 25) when presented with an emotional prosody identification task. The Children's Communication Checklist and Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale were used to assess pragmatic and social adaption abilities. Results show that children with HFA performed poorer than TD children in identifying happy prosody in both emotionally neutral and relevant utterances. In contrast, children with HFA did not exhibit any deficits in identifying sad and angry prosody. Results of correlation analyses revealed a positive association between happy prosody identification and pragmatic function. The findings indicate that school-aged children with HFA experience difficulties in recognizing happy prosody, and that this limitation in prosody perception is associated with their pragmatic and social adaption performances.