Psychological Development and Education ›› 2024, Vol. 40 ›› Issue (2): 169-175.doi: 10.16187/j.cnki.issn1001-4918.2024.02.03

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The Development of Emotion Recognition Ability in 4~8 Years Old Chinese Children with High-functioning Autism Based on Language Cues

LIANG Dandan1,2, YAN Xiaomin1, GE Zhilin1   

  1. 1. School of Chinese Language and Culture, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing 210097;
    2. Interdisciplinary Research Center for Linguistic Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026
  • Published:2024-03-18

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Abstract: The current study adopted the auditory comprehension task to investigate whether there was a developmental change in using prosody and semantic cues to recognize emotions in 4~8 years old Chinese children with high-functioning autism (HFA). The results indicated that when the prosodic and semantic cues were congruent, no significant difference was found between the typically developing (TD) children and the children with HFA in recognizing the emotions of speakers. In the incongruent condition, 4~6 years old TD children relied more on the semantic cues to identify emotions, while 6~8 years old TD children relied more on the prosodic cues. In contrast, this developmental change was not detected in the HFA group, that is, children with HFA in both age groups, relied more on semantic cues to identify emotions. These findings revealed that Chinese children with HFA did not change their emotion recognition strategies as their TD peers at around 6 years old, but showed a persistent reliance on semantic cues. The absence of this developmental change in children with HFA may account for their deficits in identifying emotional information during social interaction.

Key words: children with HFA, emotion recognition ability, language cues, prosody, semantics

CLC Number: 

  • B844
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