Read my lips! Perception of speech in noise by preschool children with autism and the impact of watching the speaker’s face

Abstract

Background Adults and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders show greater difficulties comprehending speech in the presence of noise. Moreover, while neurotypical adults use visual cues on the mouth to help them understand speech in background noise, differences in attention to human faces in autism may affect use of these visual cues. No work has yet examined these skills in toddlers with ASD, despite the fact that they are frequently faced with noisy, multitalker environments. Methods Children aged 2-5 years, both with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD), saw pairs of images in a preferential looking study and were instructed to look at one of the two objects. Sentences were presented in the presence of quiet or another background talker (noise). On half of the trials, the face of the target person speaking was presented, while half had no face present. Growth-curve modeling was used to examine the time course of children’s looking to the appropriate vs. opposite image. Results Noise impaired performance for both children with ASD and their age- and language-matched peers. When there was no face present on the screen, the effect of noise was generally similar across groups with and without ASD. But when the face was present, the noise had a more detrimental effect on children with ASD than their language-matched peers, suggesting neurotypical children were better able to use visual cues on the speaker’s face to aid performance. Moreover, those children with ASD who attended more to the speaker’s face showed better listening performance in the presence of noise. Conclusions Young children both with and without ASD show poorer performance comprehending speech in the presence of another talker than in quiet. However, results suggest that neurotypical children may be better able to make use of face cues to partially counteract the effects of noise. Children with ASD varied in their use of face cues, but those children who spent more time attending to the face of the target speaker appeared less disadvantaged by the presence of background noise, indicating a potential path for future interventions.

Attention to audiovisual speech does not facilitate language acquisition in infants with familial history of autism

“…We propose that the absence of a relationship between attention to the speaker’s face and mouth regions at 12 months and language at 18 months in high‐risk infants may be due to a disruption in the processing and integration of dynamic facial and speech cues and that, unlike impaired social attention, which appears to be specific to ASD, this deficit may be shared amongst children across the autism risk spectrum. This idea is consistent with findings suggesting that 9‐month‐old high‐risk infants exhibit reduced audiovisual speech integration ability (Guiraud et al., 2012) and that preschoolers (Newman, Kirby, Von Holzen, & Redcay, 2021) and school‐aged children (Smith & Bennetto, 2007) with ASD benefit less from lip movements during speech decoding, with the effect driven largely by lower audiovisual integration skills (Smith & Bennetto, 2007). Findings also show that preschoolers with ASD do not prefer synchronous over asynchronous audiovisual events, suggesting altered multisensory speech processing and that diminished preference for synchronous speech was linked with lower language skills (Righi et al., 2018).…”

Increasing audiovisual speech integration in autism through enhanced attention to mouth

“…Our findings not only deepen the understanding of the underlying mechanisms of audiovisual speech integration in the McGurk task in autism, but also provide important insights for supporting strategies targeting audiovisual speech integration in AC. In addition, our findings confirmed the role of visual information for speech perception in AC (Newman et al., 2021).…”

Autism Spectrum Disorder and auditory sensory alterations: a systematic review on the integrity of cognitive and neuronal functions related to auditory processing

“…In contrast, the ASD group shows a detrimental effect of noise and increased arousal in the harder condition (Keith et al 2019 ). Children with ASD who attend more time to the stimulus, such as looking longer to the speaker’s face, show better listening performance (Newman et al 2021 ). When different levels of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) are compared, ASD and NT groups exhibited greater benefit at low SNRs relative to high SNRs in phoneme recognition tasks (Stevenson et al 2017 ).…”

“…Regarding other assessment paradigms, children with ASD seem to struggle with face-to-face matching, when compared to voice-face and word-face combinations (Golan et al 2018 ), with worst performance in noisy environments (Newman et al 2021 ). The ability to integrate facial-voice cues seems to be correlated with socialization skills in children with ASD (Golan et al 2018 ).…”