Statistical learning (SL), the ability to detect and extract regularities from inputs, is considered a domain-general building block for typical language development. We compared 55 verbal children with autism (ASD, 6–12 years) and 50 typically-developing children in four SL tasks. The ASD group exhibited reduced learning in the linguistic SL tasks (syllable and letter), but showed intact learning for the nonlinguistic SL tasks (tone and image). In the ASD group, better linguistic SL was associated with higher language skills measured by parental report and sentence recall. Therefore, the atypicality of SL in autism is not domain-general but tied to specific processing constraints related to verbal stimuli. Our findings provide a novel perspective for understanding language heterogeneity in autism.
This study examined individual influences on child empathy, the relationship between child and parent empathy, and the relationship between empathy and prosociality across seven countries. A large sample of children (N = 792, 49% female) from the ages of 6-10 years completed a situational empathy task, as well as a dictator game to assess prosociality. The questionnaire of cognitive and affective empathy was used to assess parents' and children's empathic dispositions. Children participated from Canada, China, Colombia, Jordan, South Africa, Turkey, and the United States. Situational empathy, empathic disposition, and prosociality were all positively associated with age. Boys displayed less situational empathy and lower empathic disposition than girls. Parental empathic disposition predicted the same dispositions in children but were not related to children's situational empathy or prosociality. No association was found between child
Background: Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit highly variable language abilities. There is a great interest in whether statistical learning (SL), a fundamental mechanism for language development, is impaired in ASD. Nevertheless, mixed findings have been reported. Furthermore, recent studies in healthy populations suggest individuals vary in their SL ability across auditory and visual modalities as well as linguistic and nonlinguistic domains. Whether children with ASD show impaired SL in specific modalities or domains still remains unknown.Methods: Thirty-one children with ASD (6 – 12 years) and 31 age and gender-matched typically developing (TD) children were assessed with an auditory linguistic (syllable), auditory nonlinguistic (tone), visual linguistic (letter), and visual nonlinguistic (image) SL tasks where children implicitly learned the embedded patterns of stimulus triplets. Learning was measured by reaction-time acceleration during familiarization, triplet-recognition accuracy after familiarization, and a composite score combining online and offline learning.Results: Children with ASD showed particular weaknesses in the linguistic SL tasks (syllable and letter) but comparable performance to the TD children in the nonlinguistic SL tasks (tone and image). Children with ASD showed a lack of association across SL tasks, suggesting distinct underlying learning processes for SL across domains and modalities. The specific weaknesses in linguistic SL appear to be more evident in older children with ASD compared to younger children with ASD.Conclusions: We found children with ASD are not in general impaired in SL. Instead, their difficulties lie specifically in the linguistic domains. We also provided preliminary evidence hinting a reciprocal relationship between linguistic SL and language development, as the weaknesses in linguistic SL exacerbate over development in our cross-sectional sample. Future longitudinal research will elucidate whether impaired linguistic SL is an outcome or a cause of impaired language skills in a substantial subgroup of children with ASD.
Stevens (2002) proposes that the distinctive feature [glide] is signaled by an acoustic landmark, i.e., an amplitude/F1 minimum, usually during a phonated region, but this hypothesis has not been tested extensively in languages other than American English. This study analyzes acoustic realizations of tapped /ɾ/ and trilled /r/ sounds in European Spanish, identifying a range of acoustic realizations for these consonants, including glides, and proposing criteria for identifying Spanish tap and trill landmarks in the speech signal. The speech sample of 200 tokens was drawn from the Albayzin corpus, which includes recordings of read Castillian Spanish from male and female speakers. Tokens were characterized by the number of amplitude minima (or occlusions) as well as the presence or absence of vocal fold vibration and noise. Additional factors analyzed include the rate of amplitude modification (tongue tip vibration), and contextual factors, including word and syllable position, stress, and consonant clusters. These moments of abrupt change (amplitude inflection points) provide cues to the manner features of the speaker’s intended words, and are hypothesized to play a significant role in perceptual processing and word recognition. These initial results for /r/ provide the basis for extension of this analysis to other Spanish glides.
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