Recognition of emotional-prosodic meanings in speech by autistic, schizophrenic, and normal children

The abilities of autistic, schizophrenic, and normal-control children to label four emotional intonations (the emotional task) in speech were tested, along with a linguistic task. All stimuli were pretested on normal adults. Older (8 years of age) normal children performed as well as adults on both tasks; younger normal children and both younger and older autistic children performed poorly on the emotional task; children (all older) diagnosed as schizophrenic were not significantly impaired in either task. Mental age was not correlated with performance in autistic children. The relevance of these results to other findings regarding emotional and linguistic behaviors in normal and disabled children is considered.