Do children with ASD have emotion recognition difficulties? : insights from emotion and lexical tone perception in Cantonese-speaking children with and without ASD

Abstract

Studies on emotion recognition in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) reported inconsistent findings, arguing whether ASD children show deficits in identifying basic emotions. Different theories have been proposed to support both sides of the findings. To test these theories, this study compared identification of six basic emotions in three different modalities – auditory-only (AO), visual-only (VO), bimodal auditory-visual (AV) - in 23 ASD children who passed the language and non-verbal IQ tests and 32 chronological agematched typically developing (TD) children between 6 to 7 years old. Also, emotion and lexical tone identification in the auditory modality in ASD and TD children was compared to determine whether ASD children were better at processing local than global information as suggested by the Weak Central Coherence theory. Results showed comparable emotion identification ability in ASD and TD children and enhanced lexical tone identification in ASD children. The findings suggested that ASD children with comparable language skills and non-verbal intelligence have no deficits of global processing of affective prosody and have an advantage in processing local-oriented acoustic information in auditory signals, supporting the Enhanced Perceptual Functioning theory, refuting Weak Central Coherence theory.