Brain oscillatory patterns of affective prosody perception in children with autism spectrum disorder

Abstract

BackgroundParalinguistic features, such as prosody (tempo, loudness, and timbre), are an essential marker of a speaker’s emotional state. Abnormal processing of emotional prosody may result in the deficient social behavior associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). MethodTwo groups of children participated in our study: the ASD group consisted of 30 preschoolers from 4 to 6 years of age and 24 typically developing (TD) peers. An electroencephalogram (EEG) was acquired in response to a combination of syllables uttered with the following types of emotional prosody: joy, anger, sadness, fear, and calmness. ResultsChildren with ASD and TD showed a similar EEG oscillatory response to fear and anger prosodies. Significant group differences in power spectral density (PSD) were detected for sad and joy intonations. The PSD differences between pairs of intonations, such as joyful and sad, sad and neutral, or joyful and neutral, were significantly higher in the control group than in the ASD group. EEG responses to affective prosody also demonstrated less hemispheric asymmetry in the ASD than in the TD group. ConclusionsOur results suggest that difficulties in emotional prosody recognition in autistic children could be based on the atypical processing of specific acoustic features coding differences between sad, neutral, and joyful intonations and could underlie emotional perception deficits in individuals with ASD.