Recognition of emotions from prosody in typical and atypical development

Abstract

Recognizing the pragmatic meaning conveyed by prosody is a vital component of socio-communicative development. Since children with ASD or ADHD often experience delayed social-emotional growth, they frequently struggle to grasp the subtle meanings expressed through prosody. The present study examines the development of recognizing the six basic emotions (joy, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, surprise) from prosody in typical development (TD) and in certain neurodevelopmental disorders.

The study consisted of sentence-picture matching tasks, where participants were required to recognize emotions – either explicitly or as mediated by prosody – and pair them with the appropriate facial expressions. In the baseline task, explicitly named emotions were matched with corresponding faces. In the subsequent task, the emotional content was carried by prosody: in one condition, prosody was supported by semantic cues, while in the other, the face corresponding to the conveyed emotion had to be selected based solely on prosody.

A total of 174 children participated in the study (TD: n=103, mean age: 7;6 years; ADHD: n=33, mean age: 9;5 years; ASD: n=22, mean age: 9;7 years; ASD+ADHD: n=16, mean age: 8;9 years).

The results indicate that when the emotion must be identified from explicit text, there is no performance difference between the typical and atypical development groups; this suggests that the identification of basic emotions in itself does not pose a problem for the atypical groups. However, all three atypical groups showed significantly lower performance compared to the TD group in recognizing emotions from prosody, both with and without semantic support. Significant individual differences in prosodic comprehension were observed within each developmental disorder. One-third of the ADHD group, half of the ASD group, and two-thirds of the ASD+ADHD group performed at least -1.5 SD below the mean of the TD group.