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Recognitionofemotional‐prosodicmeaningsinspeechbyautistic,schizophrenic,andnormalchildren

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Recognition of emotional‐prosodic meanings inspeech by autistic, schizophrenic, and normalchildren

Diana Van Lancker , Cathleen Cornelius & Jody Kreiman

To cite this article: Diana Van Lancker , Cathleen Cornelius & Jody Kreiman (1989) Recognitionof emotional‐prosodic meanings in speech by autistic, schizophrenic, and normal children,Developmental Neuropsychology, 5:2-3, 207-226, DOI: 10.1080/87565648909540433

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DEVELOPMENTAL NEUROPSYCHOLOGY, 1989, 5(2 & 3), 207-226Copyright © 1989, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Recognition of Emotional-ProsodicMeanings in Speech by Autistic,

Schizophrenic, and Normal Children

Diana Van LanckerDepartment of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences

University of California at Los Angeles

Cathleen CorneliusLos Angeles County School District

Jody KreimanPhonetics Laboratory

Department of LinguisticsUniversity of California at Los Angeles

The abilities of autistic, schizophrenic, and normal-control children to label fouremotional intonations (the emotional task) in speech were tested, along witha linguistic task. All stimuli were pretested on normal adults. Older ( 8 yearsof age) normal children performed as well as adults on both tasks; youngernormal children and both younger and older autistic children performed poorlyon the emotional task; children (all older) diagnosed as schizophrenic were notsignificantly impaired in either task. Mental age was not correlated with per-formance in autistic children. The relevance of these results to other findingsregarding emotional and linguistic behaviors in normal and disabled childrenis considered.

Every speech utterance carries both linguistic (prepositional) and paralinguisticmeanings. Linguistic meanings are carried by the consonants and vowels;paralinguistic information is carried mainly by the "melody" of speech, orprosody (Crystal, 1975; Cutler & Ladd, 1983). Paralinguistic information in-cludes such "tone of voice" material as attitude, emotion, mood, and per-

Requests for reprints should be sent to Diana Van Lancker, Department of Neuroscience,School of Medicine, University of North Dakota Medical Education Center, 1919 Elm StreetNorth, Fargo, ND 58102.

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208 VAN LANCKER, CORNELIUS, KREIMAN

sonal voice identify. The sentence You are going! can be said with many"shades" of paralinguistic meaning: surprise, cheerfulness, anger, fear, en-thusiasm; it can communicate any number of attitudes toward the listener,such as doubt, authority, or permission, and so on; and it carries informa-tion about the sex, age, size, education, personality, and geographic back-ground of the speaker. Normal adult listeners make consistent judgmentsabout many of these parameters from the auditory stimulus alone (e.g., Ap-ple, Streeter, & Krauss, 1979; Bricker & Pruzansky, 1976; Laver, 1980; Ptacek& Sander, 1966). In this study, we examine the relative abilities of autistic,schizophrenic, and normal children to identify the linguistic and prosodic con-tent of speech. In particular, we hypothesize that of the clinical groups, autisticchildren will be more impaired in identifying the emotional and linguistic con-tent of utterances, when compared to schizophrenic and normal children. Fur-thermore, we hypothesize that both clinical groups will perform less well inrecognizing emotional meanings than in recognizing comparable linguisticmeanings.

Although the importance of social skills has recently been recognized inlanguage development (Bruner, 1981), with research extending into the fieldof pragmatics (Bates, Benigni, Bretherton, Camaioni, & Volterra, 1979; Bates& MacWhinney, 1979; Sachs & Devin, 1976), only a few studies have lookedclosely at such aspects of the emotional lives of children as abilities to talkabout feelings (Glasberg & Aboud, 1982; W. C. Lewis, Wolman, & King, 1971)and to infer emotional meaning from verbal texts (Gnepp, Klayman, &Trabasso, 1982). A child's emotional "makeup," including responses to per-ceived emotions, impacts powerfully on the quality of his or her life. Theimportance of these factors is obvious to all who work and live with children,yet only recently have researchers tackled the problem of describing, assess-ing, and quantifying emotional behaviors and abilities of children (Izard,Kagan, & Zajonc, 1984; Schwartz & Trabasso, 1984; Yarrow, 1980). Despiterecent interest in the development of social skills (Cicchetti & Schneider-Rosen,1984; Izard et al., 1984; M. Lewis & Michalson, 1982; Mundy & Sigman, inpress; Mundy, Sigman, Ungerer, & Sherman, in press; Murphy, 1983; Sigman,Mundy, Sherman, & Ungerer, 1986; Yarrow, 1980; Zuckerman, Lipsets, Koivu-maky, & Rosenthal, 1975), with a few exceptions (e.g., M. Lewis & Rosen-baum, 1978; W. C. Lewis, Wolman, & King, 1970; Murphy 1983; for a review,see M. Lewis & Michalson, 1983) research on normal children has insteadfocused primarily on the development of cognitive abilities, using measuresof intelligence.

A study of children's comprehension of emotional meanings in speech isinteresting for several reasons. Normal children produce and comprehendsubtle prosodic nuances of speech, signaling both linguistic and paralinguisticinformation, well before uttering their first phonological word (Crystal, 1973;Delack & Fowlow, 1978; Friedlander, 1970; Garnica, 1977; Sheppard & Lane,1968). It has been claimed, for example, that linguistic contrasts cued in pro-

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EMOTIONAL-PROSODIC MEANINGS IN SPEECH 209

sodic material (including question vs. statement), and cues for turn-takingin conversation, are produced and comprehended by 6 to 9 months (Crystal,1978; Tonkova-Yampol'skaya, 1969). This has been well investigated in thespeech of caretakers, who adopt specific prosodic features in talking to in-fants and young children (Chapman, 1981; Garnica, 1977; Newport, 1976;Papousek & Papousek, 1975; Sachs, Brown, & Salerno, 1976; Schaffer, Col-lis, & Parsons, 1977; Snow, 1972; Stern, 1982; Stern, Spieker, Barnett, &MacKain, 1983). The ability of infants to respond specifically to emotionshas been described in empathetic distress crying (Sagi & Hoffman, 1976;Simner, 1971) and in studies using emotional stimuli (Dimitrovsky, 1964;Walker, 1981). Studies on the development of voice recognition show that in-fants (De Casper & Fifer, 1980; Martin & Clarke, 1982; Mills & Melhirsh,1974) and grammar-school children (Mann, Diamond, & Carey, 1979) caneasily recognize voices of caretakers and peers. These studies point to anotherkind of very early competence for comprehension of prosodic informationin speech.

This article reports on preliminary studies of the abilities of normal anddisabled children to recognize emotional meanings in speech utterances. Wechose to compare autistic and schizophrenic children with a normal controlgroup for several reasons. Both clinical groups have emotional/social disorders.Kanner (1968) referred specifically to the disturbances of "affective contact"of autistic children. More recently, Hobson (1986a, 1986b) demonstrated thatolder autistic children were not able to match videotaped emotional scenesto faces picturing those emotions. The prosodic deficits in the speech pro-duction of autistic children are well known (Baltaxe, 1986; Baltaxe & Sim-mons, 1975; Brooker & Mareth, 1982; Prizant, 1983; Ricks & Wing, 1975;Rutter, 1976,1983; Rutter, Bartak, & Newman, 1971; Sigman, Ungerer, Mundy,& Sherman, 1987). Some never develop language; others develop rudimentsof speech, using imitation (Simon, 1975) and ritual, holistic phrases, but failto develop grammatical abilities associated with left-hemisphere specializa-tion for language (DeMyer, Alpern, Barton, & Kimberlin, 1972). Many autisticchildren who attain some language ability speak in a monotone or "mechan-ical" tone of voice. It is not known, however, whether these deficits in pros-ody are specific to linguistic functions (e.g., distinguishing between questionsand statements by rising versus falling intonation), or whether they encom-pass paralinguistic communication (e.g., recognizing emotions in the speechof others). For the schizophrenic group, observed social/affective and languagedisorders have been attributed to underlying thought disorder. Hence theabilities of schizophrenic children to comprehend emotions in speech oughtto be unimpaired. However, componential deficits in language, social skills,and emotional development in this group remain to be carefully investigated.

A further reason for investigating the emotional abilities of normal anddisabled children comes from the laterality work in this field. Paralinguisticmeanings are processed by cerebral mechanisms different from those underly-

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210 VAN LANCKER, CORNELIUS, KREIMAN

ing abilities for prepositional language. Studies of brain-damaged adults sug-gest that the perception and production of paralinguistic meanings arerepresented in the right hemisphere (Blumstein & Cooper, 1974; Kent &Rosenbek, 1982; Ross, 1983; Van Lancker & Kreiman, 1987), whereas percep-tion and production of linguistic ability is represented primarily in the lefthemisphere of most right-handed adults (Bryden, 1982). For example, nonver-bal auditory patterns have been associated with right-hemisphere processing(King & Kimura, 1972). For emotional prosody in speech, recent studies in-dicate that recognition of emotional meanings in sentences is superior at theleft ear in dichotic listening, whereas linguistic meaning in the same stimuliis better recognized at the right ear in most children and adults (Bryden, 1982;Ley & Bryden, 1982; Saxby & Bryden, 1982). This laterality is stronglyestablished by age 5. The language deficits of autistic children have led toquestions about abnormal hemispheric specialization in these groups. Along-side the linguistic deficit, the relative superiority of visuospatial processes inmany autistic children has led to the hypothesis that autism may involveprimarily a left-hemisphere dysfunction. Some studies have claimed a relativesuperiority in autistic children for right-hemisphere functions such as visualand auditory patterns (eg., music; Applebaum, Egel, Koegel, & Imhoff, 1979).Dawson, Warrenburg, and Fuller (1982) found an atypical laterality patternin autistic children; however, proposals that the left hemisphere is selectivelyimpaired have been disputed (Arnold & Schwartz, 1983; H. Damasio, Maurer,A. Damasio, & Chin, 1970). Most researchers now agree that the disorderhas an organic basis (A. Damasio, 1984); bilateral, including frontal, as wellas subcortical brain damage has been implicated. An investigation of theabilities of autistic children to comprehend emotional meanings in speechmay add to our understanding of the deficits in this population.

Similarly, in schizophrenic adults, converging evidence suggests that noclear picture of hemispheric impairment emerges (Van Lancker, 1985). Ourinterest in testing schizophrenic children stems from observations of emo-tional disorders in this population. Although symptomatology for languageand emotional behaviors is highly variable in this group, language abilitiesare generally relatively intact, in comparison to children diagnosed with autism,and many of these children show inappropriate affect and abnormal conver-sational interaction. Little is known about their abilities to comprehend emo-tional meanings in speech. A finding that schizophrenic children are specific-ally impaired in perceiving the emotional content of speech would suggestone source of instances of bizarre interactional output.

In this study, autistic, schizophrenic, and normal-control children were com-pared in their abilities to comprehend linguistic versus emotional meaningsin speech. "Bidimensional" stimuli were used—each stimulus contained twochannels of information, a linguistic meaning carried by the vowels and con-sonants, and an emotional meaning carried in the intonation, or prosody,

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EMOTIONAL-PROSODIC MEANINGS IN SPEECH 211

of the utterance. Children were directed by the response condition to processeither the linguistic or the emotional channel in the stimuli.

METHOD

Children

Clinical subjects included 28 autistic children and 19 schizophrenic children.Thirty-three normal-control children were also tested. The children were seenand diagnosed by the Child Psychiatry Clinical Research Center at UCLA'sNeuropsychiatric Institute. Every child received an extensive evaluation, in-cluding a detailed developmental history using a questionnaire, a videotapedpsychiatric assessment, psychological and linguistic testing, pediatric andneurological examination, and audiological assessment. All examinations werecarried out by a professional team of child psychiatrists and child psychol-ogists, language pathologists, an audiologist, a social worker, and a pediatri-cian, all expert in dealing with psychotic children. A diagnosis of early in-fantile autism, or childhood schizophrenia, was reached only if all or all butone member of the team agreed that the child's condition met all the criterialisted in the American Psychiatric Association's (1980) Diagnostic andStatistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Children whose developmental quo-tient or IQ was less than 40 on a standardized psychological assessment wererejected (Tanguay, Edwards, Buchwald, Schwafel, & Allen, 1982). Mental ageswere measured using the Merrill-Palmer Test and the Wechsler Preschool andPrimary Test of Intelligence within 6 months of testing. Performance of theautistic children is presented in terms of both chronological age (CA) andmental age (MA; see Figures 3 to 10). Using those data, individual children'sscores are plotted to discover whether CA or MA is the more useful measurein predicting performance in autistic children, and to determine the role ofmental retardation in the performance of individual autistic children. However,group statistics comparing normal-control, autistic, and schizophrenic childrenwere performed using CA information only, for the following reasons:

1. Normal children younger than 8 years were found to perform poorlyon the emotional but not the linguistic task, in contrast to children older than8. This led us to analyze normal-control performance in terms of a youngerand an older group.

2. MA scores for autistic children were not high enough to distribute theminto two age groups corresponding to the two significantly different age groupsobserved in normal-control children.

3. MA information was unavailable on many of the schizophrenic children.4. Nearly all the children diagnosed as schizophrenic belonged to the older

test group ( > 8 years).

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212 VAN LANCKER, CORNELIUS, KREIMAN

Group

NormalYounger*Older"

Composition

n

331716

Autistic (chronologicalage)

Younger"Older"

Schizophrenic0

28101819

TABLEof the Three

1Experimental Groups

Age (Years)

M

5.311.2

6.911.39.6

SD

1.42.5

1.23.12.1

Mental Age

M

4.67.7

SD

1.32.7

Range

3.3 to 7.88.2 to 17.0

4.0 to 7.98.0 to 22.05.0 to 13.0

"Less than 8 years old. b8 years old or older."Included one 5-year-old and one 8-year-old; all other children in this group ranged in age

from 8 to 13 years.

Age information for autistic, schizophrenic, and normal-control children isgiven in Table 1. All normal control children were free of psychiatric or signifi-cant medical history.

Stimuli

Five emotionally neutral sentence-types were selected (e.g, Lizzy is pettingher cat, Johnny is walking his dog). The utterances were spoken by a profes-sional actress who was instructed to say the sentences as naturally as possiblewith 4 different emotional intonations—sad, angry, happy, or surprised—yielding 20 stimuli. The stimuli were "bidimensional," in that each sentencecontained both a linguistic meaning (e.g., "Johnny is walking his dog") andan emotional meaning (e.g., "happy") that were carried in the intonation.The sentences were recorded using a dynamic microphone and an Ampex reel-to-reel tape recorder in a sound-attenuated booth. For each condition, emo-tional and linguistic the 20 test sentences were randomized and transferredonto a cassette tape.

Response sheets were prepared so that a linguistic and an emotional judg-ment could be made for each stimulus. For the linguistic task, children werepresented with four line drawings of scenes (see Figure 1) representing thelinguistic meaning of the stimuli (e.g., boy walking dog, girl petting cat); forthe emotional task, they were presented with line drawings (see Figure 2) ofa happy, sad, angry, and surprised face, with the written word for each emo-tion below the face.

The emotional condition began with tape-recorded instructions in the voiceof the actress, stating that "Sometimes I feel sad, sometimes happy, sometimesangry, sometimes surprised; and then when I talk, I sound just like I feel.

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EMOTIONAL-PROSODIC MEANINGS IN SPEECH 213

Listen to me talk now, and point to the picture that shows how I feel." Ininstructing the child to listen to her and point to the right picture to indicatehow she is feeling, the child had an opportunity to become accustomed tothe speaker's voice, while hearing the instructions. For the linguistic condi-tion, the instructions, given on tape by the same speaker, were to point tothe picture that shows what the sentence means.

Both linguistic and emotional conditions were preceded by four practiceitems, which were repeated until it was clear that the child understood thetask. Thus each child heard 4 practice items and 16 test items for each condi-tion, linguistic and emotional. For each tape-recorded test utterance, the childwas encouraged to point to one of four drawings. The examiner was carefulnot to look at any one of the four response items. When a clear pointingresponse from the child was observed, the examiner then entered the child'sresponses onto a separate answer sheet. The order of tasks (linguistic/emo-tional) was alternated with each child.

These stimuli were pretested on 45 normal adults, 16 men and 29 women,ages 21 to 65 (M = 31.4 years, SD = 12.0 years), who scored an average of100% on the linguistic task and 97.4% (SD = 5.24 points) on the emotionaltask. The normal adults tested were all native speakers of English withoutpsychiatric history and with education ranging from high-school-graduate topostgraduate levels.

FIGURE 1 Response sheet for the linguistic condition of affective/prosodic protocol.

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214 VAN LANCKER, CORNELIUS, KREIMAN

SAD

ANGRY

HAPPY

SURPRISED

RESULTS

FIGURE 2 Response sheet for theaffective condition of affective/prosodic protocol.

As mentioned earlier, the stimuli were prepared such that normal adults wouldperform nearly perfectly on both tasks. Our interest was in comparingdevelopmental schedules of normal and clinical participants on emotionalversus linguistic stimuli. Preliminary data analysis indicated that normalchildren fell into two disjunctive groups with respect to their performanceon the affective task: younger and older, with a clean break between ages7 and 8 years. Therefore, the autistic and normal-control groups were eachdivided into two subgroups: (a) children age 8 or older and (b) children under8. The schizophrenic group included mainly older children, because childrenunder 7 seldom receive this diagnosis (e.g., only one schizophrenic child under7 was tested (see Figure 9).

Mean scores (percentage correct) for all three groups are shown in Table2. Older normal children performed well on both tasks: They made virtuallyno errors on the linguistic task, and only 8% errors in the emotional condi-tion. Younger normal children also performed well on the linguistic task (7%errors). Scores on the linguistic task are plotted against age in Figure 3. Scoreson the emotional task are plotted against age in Figure 4, which shows thatyounger normal children were relatively unable to do the task, whereas older

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EMOTIONAL-PROSODIC MEANINGS IN SPEECH 215

normals performed at a mean of 92% correct. A shift in performance occur-red at about age 8. The difference between the older and younger groups inperformance on the emotional task was significant, f(32) = - 5.79, p < .001.Additionally, performance is significantly correlated with age (r = .66, p< .001). Because nearly all normal children scored perfectly on the linguistictask, no correlation was calculated.

Most younger and older autistic children performed relatively well on thelinguistic task, although individual scores varied far more than did scores forthe normal group: The younger autistic group averaged 72% correct, whereasthe older autistic group averaged 89% correct, a significant difference, t(26)= - 2.06, p < .05. Older autistic children also performed better than youngerones on the emotional task, f(26) = 2.07, p < .05.

We wished to determine whether information on MA in the autistic pop-ulation would reveal a pattern in performance on the two tasks, such thatmental retardation in the children would be related to linguistic or affectiverecognition abilities. To this end, individual scores on each task were plottedversus CA and versus MA for autistic children (Figures 5 to 8). For the autisticchildren, CA was a poor predictor of performance on both tasks (linguistictask, r = .21, p > .2; emotional task, r = .08, p > .7). As might be expected,performance does vary slightly more regularly, although not significantly, witha child's MA (linguistic task, r = .47, p < .03; emotional task, r - .40, p < .06).However, these correlation values are small relative to those observed for thenormal control group, and even children with the highest MAs continue tohave difficulty with the emotional task. Autistic children did not show thesame acquisition pattern for understanding the labeling of verbal expressionsof emotion that normal children do (i.e., abrupt changes in performance atabout age 8). The younger autistic children were poor at the affective judg-ment, and the older autistic children varied greatly in their ability to make

TABLE 2Means and Standard Deviations of Performance on Linguistic and

Emotional Tasks for Normal and Autistic Groups Over 8 Years (Older)and Under 8 Years (Younger) and for the (Older) Schizophrenic Group

Group

Younger normalOlder normal

Younger autisticOlder autistic

Schizophrenic (older)

n

1617

1018

19

Linguistic

MeanPercentage

Correct

92.3100

71.988.5

99.0

Task

SD

16.60

24.218.2

3.1

Emotional

MeanPercentage

Correct

47.891.8

38.861.1

82.4

Task

SD

29.87.8

18.831.0

15.4

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216 VAN LANCKER, CORNELIUS, KREIMAN

100-j

90-

80-

70-

60-

50-

40-

30-

20-

10-

> Normal Controls

2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22

(Chronological) Age

FIGURE 3 Normal children's linguistic scores, by chronological age.

100-

90-

80

70-

60

50

E 40u

8s 30-

20-

10-

Normal Controls

2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22

(Chronological) Age

FIGURE 4 Normal children's emotional scores, by chronological age.

distinctions. Furthermore, the low correlation between MA and performanceon the emotional task suggests that the poor performance of autistic (relativeto normal) children on this task was not due to mental retardation, "develop-mental delay," or low MA: Some children with low MAs were proficient on theemotional task, whereas others with higher MAs were relatively unable to dothe task. MA is thus not a good predictor of performance on the emotional task.

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EMOTIONAL-PROSODIC MEANINGS IN SPEECH 2 1 7

i • Autistic Group100-

90-

80-v»

° 70"o

1 60"c

| 4 0 -

20-

10-

• •• •• mm

•• •

• ••

••

• •

2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22

(Chronological) Age

FIGURE 5 Autistic children's linguistic scores, by chronological age.

I"5|

Icoo«o

100-

9 0 -

80-

70-

60-

50-

40-

30-

20-

10-

. Autistic Group

* *

•

. . . .

•

2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22

(Chronological) Age

FIGURE 6 Autistic children's emotional scores, by chronological age.

Student-Newman-Keuls tests examined the relative performance of theautistic and normal groups on both tasks. On the linguistic task, autisticchildren under 8 produced significantly more errors than all other groups onthe linguistic task, but no other groups differed significantly in performance(MSE = 204.58, df= 58, alpha = .05). On the emotional task, normal childrenunder 8 did not differ in performance from either autistic group, but nor-

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218 VAN LANCKER, CORNELIUS, KREIMAN

100-]

90-

% 80"o—H 70-

1 60-

o 50-

U

S« 30-

20-

10 -

• • • m~ m • « Autistic Group

•

•• •

•

•• •

•

•

• •

2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22

(Mental) Age

FIGURE 7 Autistic children's linguistic scores, by mental age.

100-

90-

S 80-o1 70-o

E 60-

5 50-1)

5 40-

30-

20-

10-

« Autistic Group

• •

•

• •

•

•

• • m •

•

•

•

1 ! 1 1 P t 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 12 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22

(Mental) Age

FIGURE 8 Autistic children's emotional scores, by mental age.

mals over 8 made significantly fewer errors than did other children (MSE =542.322, df= 58, alpha = .05). Thus the older autistic children performedsignificantly worse than older normals on the emotional task, whereas thetwo younger groups did not differ significantly on that task.

Mean scores for the schizophrenic group are included in Table 2; scoreson the linguistic and emotional tasks are plotted against CA in Figures 9 and

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EMOTIONAL-PROSODIC MEANINGS IN SPEECH 219

100

90

» 8 0

o

H 70-

I 60-

o 50-

? 40-ou

J« 30-

20-

10-

> • • •» • « • • t Schizophrenic Group

6 8 10 12

(Chronological) Age

~i—i—i—i—i—i—i—i—i14 16 18 20 22

FIGURE 9 Schizophrenic children's linguistic scores, by chronological age.

100-

90-

80-

70

60-

50

40-

30-

20

10

Schizophrenic Group

81—T 1—

10 12 14 ' 16 ' 18 20 ' 22

(Chronological) Age

FIGURE 10 Schizophrenic children's emotional scores, by chronological age.

10. As the figures show, all these children performed nearly perfectly onlinguistic testing. In contrast to observations in older (and younger) autisticchildren, in the schizophrenic group, performance on the emotional tasks wassignificantly correlated with the child's age (r = .47, p < .04), suggesting that(older) schizophrenics did not differ from (older) normals in developmentalschedule on this task. This finding contrasts with results obtained for the

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2 2 0 VAN LANCKER, CORNELIUS, KREIMAN

autistic group, in which scores on the emotional task did not correlatesignificantly with CA or MA. A Student-Newman-Keuls test comparing thefive groups on the linguistic task indicated that only the younger autistic groupdiffered significantly from the others (MSE = 204.58, df= 76, alpha = .05).That is, the schizophrenic group did not differ in performance from eitherolder normal or older autistic children. On the emotional task, the older nor-mal and schizophrenic groups, again, did not differ in performance (MSE =524.32, df= 76, alpha = .05), although these two groups differed significantlyfrom the older and younger autistic and the younger normal groups.

DISCUSSION

This study compared performance in normal and clinical groups on a linguisticand an emotional task, using bidimensional, tape-recorded verbal stimuli thatcommunicated both an emotional and a linguistic meaning. First, this studyrevealed that normal children under 8 were poor in a task that required themto match emotional prosody in speech expressing four basic emotions (sad,happy, angry, or surprised) to a line-drawn face and a word referring to thatemotion, despite good performance on a test with superficially similar taskdemands (listening to a tape-recorded stimulus and matching it to one of fourpictures). In contrast, normal children above age 8 were able to match theemotional sentence to the face/word response nearly as well as adults. Thedifferences between performance on the two tasks may be attributable to con-ceptual differences between the tasks. We speculate that the linguistic meaningis foregrounded and salient, whereas the emotional meaning is backgroundedand covert. Line drawings corresponding to the linguistic meaning may beconceptually more "obvious" than line drawings requiring a labeling of emo-tional meanings carried in the intonation. Further research is required to un-cover the reasons for the disparate performance.

The rather abrupt shift from poor performance at the younger ages to goodperformance at older ages may correspond to a general shift in cognitivedevelopment reflected in other functions documented for children betweenages 5 and 7 (Shapiro & Perry, 1976; Tanguay, 1985; White, 1965). In con-trast, Dimitrovsky (1964) reported a gradual increase in correct identificationsof vocal emotion using a matching task. In that study, stick-figure drawingswith captions were used as responses, whereas faces and captions were usedin our study.

It cannot be inferred from these findings that younger children are unableto perceive and recognize the four emotions in speech. In fact, studies reviewedabove have indicated clearly that children perceive and comprehend variousaspects of prosodic information in speech from early infancy. However, wemay conclude that the ability to label or categorize acoustic cues in speechfor four common emotions is not acquired in normal children until about

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age 8. Our findings agree with those of W. C. Lewis et al. (1971), who reportedthat children ages 5 to 7 were less able to talk about their emotions than olderchildren. To determine normal children's competence for emotional com-prehension, other research is needed; for example, a discrimination task wouldeliminate the need for overt categorization and cross-modal matching, andwould assess children's abilities to recognize acoustic differences between emo-tional stimuli.

Older autistic children were not significantly worse than older normalchildren on the linguistic task. However, in the emotional condition, neitherolder nor younger autistic children differed significantly from younger nor-mal children. That is, the linguistic task did not distinguish the older normalfrom the older autistic children, but the emotional task did. As correlationscomparing performance both to MA and to CA were not significant for theautistic groups, it was concluded that the poor performance cannot beexplained by developmental delay or by lower MA. The observation that autis-tic children were poor at identifying vocalized emotional meanings fromspeech agrees with findings reported by Hobson (1986a, 1986b), who usedvideotaped emotional scenes in a similar paradigm. His stimuli included facialand vocal emotion, as well as situational context. Our study indicated thatone of the channels, vocalized emotion, is not well recognized by autisticchildren.

From these results, we cannot tell whether autistic children do not haveany competence for four emotions expressed in speech prosody, or whetherthey are merely unable to make the cross-modal matching required by thetask. That is, it cannot be said whether or not autistic children recognize emo-tional meanings expressed in the prosody of speech. It can only be said thatthey cannot match these emotions given categories to choose from. As sug-gested earlier for normals, testing using a discrimination paradigm is indicatedto address these questions.

The schizophrenic group did not differ from older normal children oneither the linguistic or the emotional tasks. This finding suggests that despitethe social/emotional disturbances in this population, an ability to recognizeand to match basic emotions expressed in the prosody of speech is intact.Thus the inappropriate behaviors observed in conversational interaction inthese children cannot be obviously attributed to a deficit in comprehendingand categorizing basic emotional meanings in the speech of their interlocutors.

This study represents a preliminary attempt to investigate emotional abilitiesof normal and developmentally disabled children. The study uses an ex-perimental paradigm very similar to that originally used by Heilman, Scholes,and Watson (1975) on left- and right-brain-damaged patients. In that study,patients listened to an emotionally intoned sentence, and pointed to a pic-tured response. Left-brain-damaged patients, all aphasics, were found not todiffer from normals, but right-brain-damaged patients were significantly im-paired in this task; that is, recognizing and matching basic emotional pros-

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ody in speech was possible for the aphasic group but not for the right-hemisphere-damaged group.

In this study, a preliminary attempt was made to measure the abilities ofthree groups (normal, autistic, and schizophrenic) to match prosodic cues forfour common emotions in speech with labels for those emotions, in compar-ison with their abilities to make comparable linguistic judgments. Our tenta-tive hypothesis, that autistic but not schizophrenic children would be impairedin the emotional judgment compared to the linguistic judgment, both as com-pared to normal-control children, was essentially supported. The surprisingfinding was that younger normal children were not successful at the emo-tional task. The reasons why the younger normal group and both autisticgroups could not successfully perform the emotional-prosody task remainto be probed. For the younger autistic group, no implications regardinghemispheric specialization can be drawn, as this group did not differsignificantly from CA-matched normals: Both performed poorly. However,results from the older autistic children, in comparison with older normal-control children, are not incompatible with the notion that autistic childrenhave bilateral hemispheric impairment (Prior & Bradshaw, 1979). This sup-position is based on findings already reviewed here that recognition of emo-tional meanings in speech in normal children is lateralized to the righthemisphere, whereas linguistic comprehension is processed in the lefthemisphere (see Bryden, 1982). In this study, autistic children were impairedin both the linguistic and the emotional tasks. However, whether the impair-ment occurs at stages of perceiving, comprehending, and/or categorizing thestimuli cannot be determined from our results. Further research, for example,using a discrimination paradigm, and possibly complementing that paradigmwith an electrophysiological measure of auditory evoked responses, may revealwhether the emotional contrasts signaled in speech prosody are processedperceptually in younger normal and in autistic children.

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