Emotion Comprehension in Intramodal and Cross-modal Matching: A Preliminary Comparison between Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders and Those With Williams Syndrome

Abstract

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and Williams syndrome (WS) exhibit contrasting forms of emotion comprehension; however, few studies have directly compared the two. In this study, we directly compared six children with ASD, chronological age 3–7, with six children with WS, chronological ages ranging 4–11, but were matched with the ASD children in terms of developmental age. The children’s development of emotion comprehension was assessed by intramodal (visual stimulus–visual stimulus) and cross-modal (auditory stimulus–visual stimulus) matching. Facial expressions were used as visual stimuli, and affective prosodies were used as auditory stimuli. Children with ASD were less accurate than those with WS on cross-modal matching, but equally accurate on intramodal matching. The results suggest that deficits in emotion comprehension among children with ASD may be related to difficulties in understanding the relationship between auditory and visual stimuli and the deficits may be greater at younger ages.