自闭症儿童语音情感感知研究

A STUDY ON SPEECH EMOTIONAL PERCEPTION OF CHILDREN WITH AUTISM

自闭症谱系障碍是一种严重的广泛性发育障碍,患者一般存在社会情感互动及人际沟通上的缺陷。自闭症患者在语音情感的感知上是否存在缺陷,与普通人在情感识别的模式上是否存在差异,此类问题在前人的研究中存在很大的分歧。该研究通过对比自闭症儿童与典型发展儿童在识别开心、生气、害怕、伤心四种情感语音时的表现,发现虽然在各种情感的混淆情况及识别偏向上自闭症儿童与典型发展儿童的趋势基本一致,但自闭症儿童识别正确率显著弱于典型发展儿童。通过VB-MAPP得分与情感感知得分的显著相关及上述结果可以看出,自闭症儿童在语音情感感知能力上并没有缺陷,其表现较差是因其任务执行相关能力较弱而非情感感知缺陷导致的。

Autism Spectrum Disorder(ASD)is a serious pervasive developmental disorder.People with ASD generally have defects in the interaction of social emotion and communication.The study of the emotional perception of autistic people is important to deepen the understanding of the pathological mechanisms of ASD.In terms of the emotional perception ability of autistic people,researchers mainly focus on facial expressions.Howerer,speech rhythm abnormalities are one of the key features of autism,and research on the perception of speech emotion of autistic children has important implications for the study and treatment of language disorders in children with autism.Research on speech emotion recognition is inadequate,especially in China.Are there any defects in the perception of speech emotion in autistic people?Are there any differences between autistic children and typical development children in emotion recognition patterns?Previous studies have not reached consistent conclusions.In this study,twenty TD(Typically Developing)children and twenty ASD(Autism Spectrum Disorder)children were matched on age and gender.They served as subjects in a speech emotion identification task for four different emotions,including happiness,anger,fear,and sadness.The four kinds of emotional speech were performed by the same speaker based on the same expository text.And the identification of speech emotions based on these materials reached a high level of agreement in tests with adults.By comparing the performance of TD children and ASD children in identifying four emotional sounds through repeated measured ANOVA and T-test,we investigated whether there are differences between the two groups in the ability to recognize speech emotions in terms of identifying trends and confusions.We also conducted a correlation analysis between VB-MAPP(Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program)scores and perception scores of speech emotion in ASD children to explore the relationship between their task executian-lelcted ability and speech emotion perception ability.As a result,we found that the performance of recognition accuracy of ASD children was significantly weaker than that of TD children.However,the trend of emotional confusion and recognition preference of ASD children were basically consistent with that of TD children.Based on the above results and the significant correlations between the VB-MAPP scores and the emotional perception score,it can be concluded that ASD children have no defects in the ability to perceive emotions from speech.Their poor performances are caused by weak task execution-related ability rather than emotional perception defects.The results of this study support the notion that the deficit in emotional perception is not a core deficit of autism.For children with autism,the scores on multiple items of the VB-MAPP correlated well with scores on the emotional speech identification task,suggesting that training in some of the basic abilities of children with autism may be useful in improving their performance on emotional speech perception.This also reveals that it is important to pay attention to the design of tasks when conducting experiments with ASD children.Sometimes it is the ability to execute tasks rather than the ability we want to explore that restricts the performance of autistic people.