Emotion recognition in speech and music of Cantonese children with autism spectrum disorder

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurological and developmental disorder and people with ASD are found to have difficulties in speech communication and social interactions. Previous studies revealed that the performance of autistic children in emotion recognition from music and speech was less accurate compared to typically developing (TD) controls. However, there are few studies on emotion recognition from tonal languages and a direct comparison between speech and music. The current study examined emotion recognition by Cantonese-speaking children with and without ASD aged from 8 to 11. The stimuli for speech perception were recorded by an actor and the clips for music perception were segmented from piano songs, presenting different emotions (angry, happy, sad, fear, and tender). Results showed that ASD group showed a higher accuracy rate in recognizing fear and tender and a lower rate in recognizing angry, happy, and sad in the emotion recognition from speech, though the results did not reach significance. The identification rate from music differed significantly from the TD group, showing a lower accuracy in general. The outcome indicates that Cantonese ASD children may have difficulties in emotion recognition more from music and may have a better judgment on certain negative emotions like fear.