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Processing of Affective Speech Prosody is Impaired in Asperger Syndrome

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Abstract

Many people with the diagnosis of Asperger syndrome (AS) show poorly developed skills in understanding emotional messages. The present study addressed discrimination of speech prosody in children with AS at neurophysiological level. Detection of affective prosody was investigated in one-word utterances as indexed by the N1 and the mismatch negativity (MMN) of auditory event-related potentials (ERPs). Data from fourteen boys with AS were compared with those for thirteen typically developed boys. These results suggest atypical neural responses to affective prosody in children with AS and their fathers, especially over the RH, and that this impairment can already be seen at low-level information processes. Our results provide evidence for familial patterns of abnormal auditory brain reactions to prosodic features of speech.

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Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the children and their parents for participating in this study. We are grateful to many researchers in the Genetic Study of High Functioning Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome in Finland at Oulu University Hospital for the collaboration. The research was supported by the National Alliance for Autism Research (NAAR), awarded to Professor David Pauls. The Rinnekoti Foundation, Espoo, Finland, also supported this study. We thank the research psychologist Katja Jussila for her help in the data collection. This research is part of the Genetic Study of High Functioning Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome in Finland. The study concerns whole families and the data collecting is ongoing. Two ERP studies of the same population have been published by Jansson-Verkasalo et al., 2004, 2005.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cognitive Laboratory, Clinical Neurophysiology, Oulu University Hospital, Oulu, Finland

    Pirjo Korpilahti, Eira Jansson-Verkasalo, Kalervo Suominen & Seppo Rytky

  2. School of Finnish and General Linguistics, University of Turku, Turku, Finland

    Pirjo Korpilahti

  3. Department of Finnish, Information Studies and Logopedics, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

    Eira Jansson-Verkasalo

  4. Department of Psychology, Cognitive Brain Research Unit, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Eira Jansson-Verkasalo

  5. Department of Child Psychiatry, Oulu University Hospital, Oulu, Finland

    Marja-Leena Mattila, Sanna Kuusikko & Irma Moilanen

  6. Psychiatric and Neurodevelopmental Genetics Unit, Center for Human Genetic Research, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, MA, USA

    David L. Pauls

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  1. Pirjo Korpilahti
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Korpilahti, P., Jansson-Verkasalo, E., Mattila, ML. et al. Processing of Affective Speech Prosody is Impaired in Asperger Syndrome. J Autism Dev Disord 37, 1539–1549 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-006-0271-2

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