Abstract:

Emotional prosody recognition is the process that someone extracts emotional information from the changes in acoustic cues, and infers others’ emotions. The defect of emotional prosody recognition, which is influenced by the intensity of emotional prosody, semantic information, situational context, psychoacoustic ability and co-morbidity, is a common performance in autism spectrum disorders. The reasons that explain this defect in these patients concentrate on the mentalizing account, the social motivation theory and hypo-priors hypothesis. The neural mechanisms of emotional prosody recognition in autism spectrum disorders focus on comparative studies with typically developing subjects, including right-hemisphere superiority, increased brain activation, under-connective brain networks and abnormal early attention processing. Future studies should focus on improving the ecological validity of the paradigms, taking the individual differences into account, integrating the theories, as well as exploiting effective evaluation tools and interventions.

Key words: autism spectrum disorders, emotional prosody recognition, influencing factors, reason analysis, neural mechanism