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

本研究的目的是探讨高功能自闭症谱系障碍（HFASD）儿童如何以及在多大程度上通过韵律线索理解说话人的精神和情绪状态。我们进行了一系列实验来检验学龄HFASD儿童是否以及如何理解(a)言语讽刺背后的说话人的意图和信念，以及(b)说话人对话语内容的感受和自信程度。得到了两个主要发现。首先，当话语中包含心理或情绪词汇时，HFASD儿童优先考虑话语中的语义信息而不是韵律信息，以推断说话者的心理和情绪状态。第二，当各种声调之间的差异足够明显时，HFASD儿童能够利用韵律信息来推断说话人话语背后的心理和情绪状态。

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.