Acoustic and neural representation of recognizing different pragmatic intentions from speech prosody in high-functioning ASD children

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulties detecting others’ intentions and attitudes from nonverbal cues in social communication. However, their ability to detect pragmatic functions from speech is less understood. This study involved high-functioning ASD children and typical controls listening to speech with different prosodies conveying attitudes towards discussion content (e.g., confident or desired speech) or the listener (e.g., dominant or friendly speech). Participants judged the attitudinal prosodies while their cortico-hemodynamic responses were monitored with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Analysis showed enhanced cortical activity in the middle/superior temporal gyrus (MTG/STG) and dorsolateral prefrontal areas during content-oriented prosody, and in the dlPFC, inferior frontal gyrus, frontopolar area, and orbitofrontal regions during listener-oriented speech in ASD children compared to the typical development (TD) group. Behaviorally, ASD children showed higher accuracy than TD when hearing listener-oriented speech but similar performance for content-oriented speech. Representational similarity analysis (RSA) indicated that ASD children used both pitch and intensity cues for listener-oriented prosodies but only intensity for content-oriented prosody. This study highlights the altered neurobehavioral profiles of speech perception in children with ASD and underscores the importance of fNIRS in assessing pragmatic functions in high-functioning ASD children.