Aberrant Emotional Prosody Circuitry Predicts Social Communication Impairments in Children With Autism.

This brain imaging study looked at how autistic children process emotions in voices. Children with autism had trouble recognizing emotions from speech and showed different brain connectivity patterns compared to other children. The differences were mainly in brain areas involved in understanding social situations, not in basic hearing areas. These brain differences were linked to social communication difficulties, suggesting that problems understanding vocal emotions contribute to social challenges in autism.

This neuroimaging study examined brain circuits underlying emotional prosody processing deficits in autism. Twenty-two children with autism and 21 controls (ages 7-12) completed an fMRI task involving recognition of sad, happy, and neutral speech. Children with autism showed specific behavioral impairments in recognizing emotions from voices and aberrant functional connectivity between voice-sensitive auditory cortex and the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) during emotional prosody processing. TPJ neural activity during emotional prosody was associated with social communication impairments in autism, while auditory cortex activity was comparable between groups.

These findings support a social-cognitive deficit model, highlighting TPJ dysfunction rather than basic auditory processing deficits as underlying emotional prosody impairments in autism.

Findings suggest interventions targeting social-cognitive processing rather than basic auditory skills may be more effective for emotional prosody deficits. Results support assessment of vocal emotion recognition abilities and highlight the importance of addressing these skills in therapeutic contexts to improve social communication outcomes.

Small sample size (22 autism, 21 controls). Single study design limits generalizability. Age range restricted to 7-12 years. Cross-sectional design prevents causal inferences. Unclear if findings extend to other emotional prosody contexts or developmental stages.

Emotional prosody provides acoustical cues that reflect a communication partner's emotional state and is crucial for successful social interactions. Many children with autism have deficits in recognizing emotions from voices; however, the neural basis for these impairments is unknown. We examined brain circuit features underlying emotional prosody processing deficits and their relationship to clinical symptoms of autism. We used an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging task to measure neural activity and connectivity during processing of sad and happy emotional prosody and neutral speech in 22 children with autism and 21 matched control children (7-12 years old).

We employed functional connectivity analyses to test competing theoretical accounts that attribute emotional prosody impairments to either sensory processing deficits in auditory cortex or theory of mind deficits instantiated in the temporoparietal junction (TPJ). Children with autism showed specific behavioral impairments for recognizing emotions from voices. They also showed aberrant functional connectivity between voice-sensitive auditory cortex and the bilateral TPJ during emotional prosody processing. Neural activity in the bilateral TPJ during processing of both sad and happy emotional prosody stimuli was associated with social communication impairments in children with autism.

In contrast, activity and decoding of emotional prosody in auditory cortex was comparable between autism and control groups and did not predict social communication impairments. Our findings support a social-cognitive deficit model of autism by identifying a role for TPJ dysfunction during emotional prosody processing. Our study underscores the importance of tuning in to vocal-emotional cues for building social connections in children with autism.