Characteristics of Speech and Emotional Sphere of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

The aim of the study is to reveal the peculiarities of speech and emotional sphere of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). For this purpose, two studies were conducted. The participants of the studies were 445 children aged 5–16 years: 175 children with ASD and 270 typically developing children. The comprehensive methodological approach including methods of spectrographic and phonetic analysis of speech, determining the physiological indicators of a child – hearing thresholds, phonemic hearing, dichotic listening test was used. The assessment of children’s emotional sphere development was conducted by standardized Child Emotional Development Method (CEDM), which includes test tasks for children on the manifestation of emotional states in voice, speech, facial expression and emotion recognition. Based on instrumental analysis, the acoustic features of the voice and speech of children with ASD were determined, which can be considered as biomarkers of the disease. The possibility of children with ASD to manifest and recognize emotions was shown. In children with ASD, the difficulties in manifesting emotional states in voice and facial expressions, recognizing emotions by abstract images and by the speech of other children were revealed. It was shown that the disease factor – the severity of autistic disorders was more important for emotional development of a child than the factor of age. The obtained data on the child speech features and the specificity of recognition and manifestation of emotions in children with ASD in complex contribute to a more accurate identification of disease markers and can be used in the development of automatic applications for the diagnosis of ASD.