Emotional Prosody Perception and Intervention in Preschoolers with Autism Spectrum Disorder
Date Issued
2016
Date
2016
Author(s)
Wang, Jia-En
Abstract
Emotional prosody perception is essential for social communication, but it is still an open issue whether children with high-function autism (HFA) exhibit any prosodic perception deficits. Further, the early intervention program for HFA preschool children with emphasis on emotional prosody perception was very rare. Study 1 investigated whether emotional prosody perception for words and sentences in HFA children (n = 72, 5–12 years of age) differed from age-matched, typically-developing children (TD, n = 70) when presented with an emotional prosody identification task. Results show that HFA preschoolers performed poorly in identifying all emotional prosody (including happy, sad and angry) from both emotionally-neutral and -relevant utterances. Additionally, the HFA school-aged children performed poorer than TD children only in perceiving happy prosody. Results of correlation analyses revealed a positive association between prosody identification, autism symptom severity, pragmatic function and social adaption. The findings indicate that preschool-aged children with HFA experience significant difficulties in recognizing happy, sad and angry, and this prosodic perception limitation is only shown to happy prosody in older HFA children. Therefore, administered an early intervention program for HFA preschoolers to facilitate their emotional prosody perception is meaningful and mandatory. Study 2 developed an “Emotional Prosody Intervention Program, EPIP” which was based on Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) and Pivotal Response Treatment (PRT) which encouraged motivation and embedded into a social skill training group. The participants of the EPIP were preschool children with HFA (n =12, mean age = 73.58 months) and were divided in two groups. The results showed that emotional prosody perception in the intervention group (Group1) improved significantly than a control group (Group 2) after EPIP intervention. In addition, emotional prosody perception was significant increasing in both groups 1 and 2 after EPIP. Moreover, the intervention effect was generalized to perceive emotional prosody of untrained stimuli. Follow-ups at one and three months showed that the intervention benefits were preserved and the perceptual performance of HFA preschoolers was similar to that of TD children. In addition, emotion and attention problems, such as, depression, anxiety and inattention/hyperactivity, were significantly reduced in HFA children; the social spontaneity, happiness, and play interaction were significantly improved after six-month social skill training group therapy. In conclusion, the EPIP facilitated preschoolers with HFA to recognize emotional prosody. EPIP is an effective and feasible approach for conducting early intervention with HFA children.
Subjects
Autism
High function autism
prosody perception
pragmatics
social adaptation
early intervention
prosody training
pivotal response treatment
social skill training
Type
thesis
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