고기능 자폐스펙트럼장애 유무에 따른 학령기 아동의 운율 및 의미단서 능력에 관한 기초연구

Abstract

Recognizing emotional cadence is essential in social communication. However, it is said that children with high-function autism category disorder experience difficulty in grasping hidden emotions and intentions in social interactions that process colloquial and non-verbal information at the same time, and inexperience in understanding emotions, smooth social communication, and interpersonal relationships. Therefore, this study was conducted to find out the semantic content of words, the ability to use rhyme cues, and the ability to recognize emotions according to the degree of contextual information to judge the emotions of speakers of children with high-function autism category. The subjects of the study were children with high-functioning autism category disorder in the 2nd to 5th grades of elementary school and general children who matched the grades. A total of 14 people were targeted, 7 children each with high-functioning autism category disorder and general children. The experimental task was produced by the researcher himself as an emotional recognition task. The two affective prosody 'happiness' and 'sadness' were used in the experimental task. In addition, emotional words were divided into direct clues included in the sentence and indirect clues not included in the sentence. Therefore, it consisted of four categories: 'happiness-indirect clue', 'happiness-direct clue', 'sadness-indirect clue', and 'sadness-direct clue'. Each category consisted of a total of 20 questions, 5 questions, and each question was 3 to 5 syllables long. The 20 questions were recorded in two affective prosody(happiness and sadness) regardless of their semantic content. In other words, it was divided into 20 matching conditions with the same semantic content and affective prosody, and 20 inconsistent conditions with the same semantic content and affective prosody. Therefore, a total of 40 questions were presented audibly to children. The assignment was carried out using E-prime 3.0 software. The child was instructed to listen to the presented sentence and select the speaker's emotion between 'happiness' and 'sadness', and responded using the keyboard button. For the analysis, E-Prime 3.0 software was used, and emotional recognition accuracy and reaction time were collected. Emotional recognition accuracy was given 1 point when emotions were judged based on the speaker's affective prosody. Response time refers to the time from the onset of stimulus to the onset of child's response. The Mann-Whitney U Test was conducted to compare the differences between each group with the collected emotional recognition accuracy and response time as dependent variables. And Wilcoxon's Signed-Ranks was conducted to examine the characteristics within each group. As a result, there was a significant difference between the two groups only under the conditions in which the meaning and affective prosody matched, and no significant difference between the two groups under other conditions. In addition, both groups showed higher accuracy under matching conditions than under inconsistency conditions. Emotional recognition response time was found to be significantly slower in HFA children than in general children except for one condition. In addition, there was no significant difference within the group in both the emotional presentation conditions(mismatch×inconsistency) and the stimulation level(indirect×direct). Through the results of this study, it can be seen that HFA children can accurately recognize emotions, but they need time and have difficulty in integrating and understanding various stimuli.