No abstract

We evaluated the effects of 3 types of noncontingent auditory stimulation (music, white noise, recordings of vocal stereotypy) on 2 children with autism who engaged in high rates of vocal stereotypy. For both participants, the music condition was the most effective in decreasing vocal stereotypy to near-zero levels, resulted in the highest parent social validity ratings, and was selected as most preferred in treatment preference evaluations.

Restricted semantic fields and resultant stimulus overselectivity are often thought to be typical of low-functioning autism, as is a strong visual processing preference. However, these conclusions may in part be an artifact of testing methodology. A 12-year-old, low-functioning and nonverbal autistic boy was tested on an auditory word-to-picture selection task. The picture foils were chosen to have visual features, semantic features, both, or neither in common with the correct answer. Errors were made more often to semantically than to visually related items, and he showed generalization to items that had not been explicitly trained. This is taken as evidence that his semantic fields are broader than otherwise apparent, and that he was capable of expanding his semantic representations independently of specific training.