Autistic children's understanding of mental and emotional states in conversation: The role of prosody

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The goal of this study is to investigate how and to what extent high-functioning children with autistic spectrum disorder (HFASD) understand the speaker's mental and emotional states on the bass of prosodic cues. We conducted a series of experiments to examine if and how school-aged HFASD children understand (a) the speaker's intentions and beliefs behind verbal sarcasm and (b) the speaker's feelings and degree of confidence about the content of the utterance. Two main findings were obtained. First, when the utterance includes mental or emotional vocabulary, HFASD children prioritize the semantic information over the prosodic information in the utterance in order to infer the speaker's mental and emotional states. Second, when the difference among a variety of tone of voices is salient enough, however, HFASD children are able to utilize the prosodic information to infer the speaker's mental and emotional states behind the utterance.