Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by wide ranging and heterogeneous changes in social and cognitive abilities, including deficits in orienting attention during early processing of stimuli. Investigators have found that there is a continuum of autism-like traits in the general population, suggesting that these autistic traits may be examined in the absence of clinically diagnosed autism. To provide evidence for the continuum of autistic traits in terms of social attention and to provide insights into social attention deficits in people with autism, the current study was conducted to examine the effect of autistic traits of typically developing individuals on social orienting using a spatial cueing paradigm. The typically developing individuals who participated in this study were divided into high autistic traits (HA) and low autistic traits groups using the Autism Quotient scale. All participants completed a spatial cueing task in which social cues (gaze) and non-social cues (arrow) were presented under different cue predictability conditions (predictive vs. non-predictive) with different SOAs (100 ms vs. 400 ms). The results showed that compared to low autistic individuals, high autistic individuals had less benefit from nonpredictive social cues but greater benefit from non-social ones, providing evidence that such spatial attention impairment in high autistic individuals is specific to the social domain. Interestingly, the smaller benefit from non-predictive social cues in high autistic individuals was shown only in the 400 ms condition, not in the 100 ms condition, suggesting that their difficulties in orienting to non-predictive social cues may be caused by a deficiency in spontaneously effortful control processing.
Purpose This study aimed to examine whether abstract knowledge of word-level linguistic prosody is independent of or integrated with phonetic knowledge. Method Event-related potential (ERP) responses were measured from 18 adult listeners while they listened to native and nonnative word-level prosody in speech and in nonspeech. The prosodic phonology (speech) conditions included disyllabic pseudowords spoken in Chinese and in English matched for syllabic structure, duration, and intensity. The prosodic acoustic (nonspeech) conditions were hummed versions of the speech stimuli, which eliminated the phonetic content while preserving the acoustic prosodic features. Results We observed language-specific effects on the ERP that native stimuli elicited larger late negative response (LNR) amplitude than nonnative stimuli in the prosodic phonology conditions. However, no such effect was observed in the phoneme-free prosodic acoustic control conditions. Conclusions The results support the integration view that word-level linguistic prosody likely relies on the phonetic content where the acoustic cues embedded in. It remains to be examined whether the LNR may serve as a neural signature for language-specific processing of prosodic phonology beyond auditory processing of the critical acoustic cues at the suprasyllabic level.
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