Affective Perception Characteristics in School-aged Children with High-functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder according to Prosody and Semantic Consistency

Objectives: The perception of emotions through prosody is crucial to social communication. However, children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often struggle to recognize others’ emotions based on various non-verbal cues. This study aims to investigate whether school-aged children with high-functioning ASD rely more on semantic cues or prosodic cues when perceiving others’ emotions. Additionally, the study examines how emotion recognition differs depending on the consistency of emotional cues. Methods: Seven school-aged children with high-functioning ASD and seven typically developing schoolaged children matched by chronological age participated in this study. Both groups were presented with 40 sentence tasks, consisting of 20 sentences where semantic and prosodic cues were consistent (consistency condition) and 20 inconsistent sentences (inconsistency condition). The accuracy and response time of the children’s affective perception based on prosody were measured. Results: There was no significant difference in accuracy between the groups in both consistent and inconsistent conditions. However, children with highfunctioning ASD exhibited slower affective perception response times compared to typically developing children in all conditions except for the indirect cue-inconsistency condition. Conclusion: The slower response times observed in children with high-functioning ASD may be explained by the multimodal binding and inferential processing deficit. Further research with a larger sample size and more diverse groups is necessary to validate these findings.