定型発達児や，自閉症，注意欠陥/ 多動性障害，聴覚障害を持つ児童を対象に音声から発話意図を理解する能力を調べた。相手を称賛する語と非難する語を，語の言語的意味と一致あるいは矛盾する感情的プロソディで発話された音声を刺激とし，発話意図を判断する課題を行った。その結果，言語的意味と感情的プロソディが一致する音声に対する正答率は矛盾する音声より有意に高かった。「心の理論検査」の誤信念課題を通過できなかった自閉症児は矛盾表現に対する正答率が他より有意に低かった。これらの結果は発話意図理解機能には複数要因の統合機能が関与し，障害に応じた特徴的差異があることを示す。
The ability to understand speakers’ intentions is examined for typically developing children (TD), children with autism spectrum disorders (AS), children with attention defi cit/hyperactivity disorder (AH), and those with hearing impairments(HI). Four types of spoken phrases were used to express praise, blame, banter and sarcasm. The praise and blame phrases have congruent valences of linguistic meanings and speaking manner expressed through affective prosody, while the banter and sarcasm phrases have incongruent valences. The subjects judged if the speaker praises you or not, or if she blames you or not, by pointing to the speaker’s smile or angry face. The correctness score varied depending on the stage of development and the type of communication disorders. All the children, except HI with heavier hearing loss than 60 dB, could correctly judge the speaker’s intention for congruent phrases. The TD younger than 7, and the AS children who could not pass the theory-of-mind tasks showed signifi cantly lower scores for incongruent phrases than congruent ones. The results suggest that speech communication relies on the ability to integrate multi-dimensional aspects of information conveyed by spoken phrases, which may contradict with each other, and this ability varies depending on the stage of development and the type of communication disorders.

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