Comprehension of affective prosody in Cantonese-speaking adults with and without high-functioning autism

Abstract

The current study compared the use of affective prosody in comprehension of speakers’ emotions and intentions in 19 Cantonese-speaking adults with high-functioning autism (HFA) and their matched neurotypical (NT) controls. Eight complex emotions and intentions including proud, guilty, surprise, disappointment, nervous, relax, sincere, and irony, were targeted. A total of 24 stories were constructed and each of them ended with a remark given by the story character expressing an emotion or intention. The remarks were recorded by a professional radio DJ. Participants judged the emotion and intention by selecting one out of four possible choices. Accuracy rate and reaction time were used as the outcome measures. The accuracy rate of the NT group was close to ceiling implying that they could use prosody cues alone to could interpret speaker’s intention reliably. The HFA group performed significantly poorer and took longer processing time than the NT group in the overall task and specifically for the emotions and intention of irony, sincere, guilty, and relax. The present study supported that Cantonese-speaking HFA individuals have a weaker ability in comprehending complex emotions and intention via affective prosody, which could be the results of poor advanced mentalizing skills and weak auditory processing ability.