The Relation Between Vocal Pitch and Vocal Emotion Recognition Abilities in People with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Typical Development.

Small sample: 16 adults with ASD and 16 comparison participants, so findings need replication in larger samples. No intervention was tested, so the study cannot show that pitch training or voice perception therapy improves emotion recognition. All participants were adults, native German speakers, had normal hearing, and had IQ above 85, so results may not apply to children, people who speak other languages, people with hearing impairment, or people with lower IQ. Three additional ASD participants and their matched controls were excluded after incidental MRI findings, data from three ASD participants were missing for the non-vocal pitch test, and one ASD outlier was excluded from pitch correlation analyses. The ASD group did not show the pitch-emotion association, but the association strength did not differ significantly between groups, so the idea that people with autism do not use pitch information is speculative. The vocal pitch and timbre tests were done in the lab with automatic difficulty adjustment and immediate feedback, while non-vocal pitch was an online test at home, so task sensitivity may differ. Only three female participants were in each group, so gender differences could not be examined. Some ASD participants had comorbid depressive episodes or social phobia, and some participants took medication for allergies or hypertension. The tasks were part of a larger battery, and some voice identity results were reported previously.

Funding came from Max-Planck-Gesellschaft and an ERC-Consolidator Grant. The supplied text does not report author conflicts of interest.

Do not conclude that poor vocal pitch perception causes poor vocal emotion recognition in autism. The study did not test an intervention, and the pitch-emotion association did not differ significantly between groups.