Abstract
Asperger's syndrome (AS) belongs to the group of autism spectrum disorders and is characterized by deficits in social interaction, as manifested e.g. by the lack of social or emotional reciprocity. The disturbance causes clinically significant impairment in social interaction. Abnormal prosody has been frequently identified as a core feature of AS. There are virtually no studies on recognition of basic emotions from speech. This study focuses on how adolescents with AS (n=12) and their typically developed controls (n=15) recognize the basic emotions happy, sad, angry, and ‘neutral’ from speech prosody. Adolescents with AS recognized basic emotions from speech prosody as well as their typically developed controls did. Possibly the recognition of basic emotions develops during the childhood.
Acknowledgements
We thank first of all the adolescents and their parents for participating in this study. We are grateful to EEG technician Raija Remes for her help in data collection and to Seppo Rytky MD for his support during this research. Furthermore, we are grateful to many researchers in the Genetic Study of High-Functioning Autism and Asperger's syndrome in Finland at Oulu University Hospital for their collaboration. The Finnish Association of Speech Therapists financially supported the research. This research was part of a larger research project, and this manuscript is the master's thesis of the first author. Two ERP studies of the same population have been published earlier (Citation66,Citation68).