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

BACKGROUND: 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. METHODS: 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). RESULTS: 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. CONCLUSIONS: 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.

Neural decoding of emotional prosody in voice-sensitive auditory cortex predicts social communication abilities in children.

During social interactions, speakers signal information about their emotional state through their voice, which is known as emotional prosody. Little is known regarding the precise brain systems underlying emotional prosody decoding in children and whether accurate neural decoding of these vocal cues is linked to social skills. Here, we address critical gaps in the developmental literature by investigating neural representations of prosody and their links to behavior in children. Multivariate pattern analysis revealed that representations in the bilateral middle and posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS) divisions of voice-sensitive auditory cortex decode emotional prosody information in children. Crucially, emotional prosody decoding in middle STS was correlated with standardized measures of social communication abilities; more accurate decoding of prosody stimuli in the STS was predictive of greater social communication abilities in children. Moreover, social communication abilities were specifically related to decoding sadness, highlighting the importance of tuning in to negative emotional vocal cues for strengthening social responsiveness and functioning. Findings bridge an important theoretical gap by showing that the ability of the voice-sensitive cortex to detect emotional cues in speech is predictive of a child's social skills, including the ability to relate and interact with others.

Neural representational similarity between symbolic and non-symbolic quantities predicts arithmetic skills in childhood but not adolescence.

Mathematical knowledge is constructed hierarchically from basic understanding of quantities and the symbols that denote them. Discrimination of numerical quantity in both symbolic and non-symbolic formats has been linked to mathematical problem-solving abilities. However, little is known of the extent to which overlap in quantity representations between symbolic and non-symbolic formats is related to individual differences in numerical problem solving and whether this relation changes with different stages of development and skill acquisition. Here we investigate the association between neural representational similarity (NRS) across symbolic and non-symbolic quantity discrimination and arithmetic problem-solving skills in early and late developmental stages: elementary school children (ages 7-10 years) and adolescents and young adults (AYA, ages 14-21 years). In children, cross-format NRS in distributed brain regions, including parietal and frontal cortices and the hippocampus, was positively correlated with arithmetic skills. In contrast, no brain region showed a significant association between cross-format NRS and arithmetic skills in the AYA group. Our findings suggest that the relationship between symbolic-non-symbolic NRS and arithmetic skills depends on developmental stage. Taken together, our study provides evidence for both mapping and estrangement hypotheses in the context of numerical problem solving, albeit over different cognitive developmental stages.