Differential Associations of Pitch Discrimination and Rapid Auditory Processing With Emotional Prosody Recognition in Autistic and Non-autistic Children

PURPOSE: Vocal cues embed speech with crucial emotional expression. Recognizing subtle changes in intonation, pitch and prosody provides rich social information and cues for responding in everyday interactions - cues that may be missed by individuals with differences in sensory processing and social development, such as those with autism. Although atypical auditory processing in autism is well-established in the literature, the contribution of these sensory differences to emotional prosody recognition requires further investigation. This study examined whether the associations of auditory abilities and social cognition with emotional prosody recognition differ between autistic and non-autistic children. METHODS: Twenty-eight autistic children and twenty-eight non-autistic children completed tasks assessing rapid auditory processing (RAP), pitch discrimination, social cognition (SC), and emotional prosody recognition (EPR) of spoken words and sentences. RESULTS: Autistic children demonstrated better RAP but lower SC performances compared to non-autistic children. No group differences were found in pitch discrimination or emotional prosody recognition. Across both groups, better RAP was associated with better emotional prosody recognition. In contrast, pitch discrimination was positively associated with emotional prosody recognition of low-intensity emotional words only in autistic children. CONCLUSION: The findings highlight the important association between RAP and emotional prosody recognition in both autistic and non-autistic children, while indicating a distinct association between pitch discrimination and emotional prosody recognition in autistic children. The results suggest the need for further research into the role of auditory processing in emotional speech perception in autism, and the potential benefits of interventions targeting pitch discrimination and RAP.