There have been inconsistent findings regarding emotion identification abilities in people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Some researchers have found global or emotion-specific impairments, while others have not. The present work reports findings from an experiment testing the ability of children with ASD (primarily Asperger syndrome) to identify basic vocal emotions. Participants identified the emotion present in pseudo-sentences spoken with affective prosody (anger, fear, happiness, sadness). Participants with ASD, at secondary school, showed a modest, non-significant performance deficit compared to typically developing controls. This minor deficit was dependent on a difference in verbal ability. There was no evidence that children with ASD had emotion-specific or valence-specific deficits. By-items correlations showed that stimuli whose emotions were difficult to identify for children with ASD were also difficult to identify for controls, while confusion matrices showed similar error patterns across groups. The results are discussed in relation to the amygdala theory of autism. (Contains 2 tables.)