Speech-Sound-Selective Auditory Impairment in Children with Autism: They Can Perceive But Do Not Attend Ceponiene R,
Lepisto T, Shestakova A, Vanhala R, Alku P, Naatanen R, Yaguchi K. Abstract: Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2003 Apr 29;100(9):5567-72. Epub 2003 Apr 17 Findings Individuals with autism show severe abnormalities in social behavior along with abnormal attention and deficient language. Attention to people and socially relevant stimuli is impaired the most. To understand this problem of attention in children with autism, the authors studied auditory (hearing) input and processing in autistic individuals —that is, they studied how children with autism reacted to sounds. The authors selected 9 high-functioning autistic children (8 males, 1 female, 6.3-12.4 years old) and 10 typically developing children (9 males, 1 female, 6.6-12.4 years old). These children listened to a random series of simple and complex tones as well as to spoken vowels in their native language (Finnish) in which a ‘‘standard’’ spoken vowel sound was occasionally replaced by an infrequent ‘‘deviant’’ vowel sound with a different frequency (different pitch, by 10%). The reactions of children were measured by their brain waves (using event-related brain wave potentials, ERP) that measured sensory and attention processing of sounds. The goal was to determine if children with autism have a disadvantage over typically developing children in reacting to speech (vowels) compared with non-speech sounds (tones). The results showed that high-functioning verbal children with autism had no significant abnormalities in processing a simple tone, a complex tone, or a vowel. However, children with autism did not orient or react to changes (deviants) in vowels (speech) the same way that normal children reacted—the children with autism showed brain waves indicating almost no orientation to complex speech compared with complex tones. Thus, the autistic childrens’ defects in processing vowel sounds as opposed to complex tones may be related to the quality of the sound perceived as speech. If such an deficit in orienting and reacting to speech is present early in infancy, it profoundly affects how verbal and nonverbal communication skills are developed in the affected children. Conclusions A defect in an autistic child’s ability to orient and react to complex speech would mean they are at a disadvantage when trying to comprehend and react to signals of social communication (e.g., complex speech and possibly subtle facial expressions) because these complex stimuli change quickly. Furthermore, if social stimuli are not particularly meaningful to children with autism, they would have no motivation to react to those speaking in social situations or, worse, they might even develop resentment to the stimuli to which they feel they should, but cannot, relate. In support of this view, research shows that 5-year-old children with autism preferred listening to nonsense sounds than to their mothers’ talking. However, children perceive and react to music well and often outperform normally developing children in musical ability. |