Speech–sound-selective auditory impairment in children with autism: They can perceive but do not attend

Abstract

In autism, severe abnormalities in social behavior coexist with aberrant attention and deficient language. In the attentional domain, attention to people and socially relevant stimuli is impaired the most. Because socially meaningful stimulus events are physically complex, a deficiency in sensory processing of complex stimuli has been suggested to contribute to aberrant attention and language in autism. This study used event-related brain potentials (ERP) to examine the sensory and early attentional processing of sounds of different complexity in high-functioning children with autism. Acoustically matched simple tones, complex tones, and vowels were presented in separate oddball sequences, in which a repetitive ''standard'' sound was occasionally replaced by an infrequent ''deviant'' sound differing from the standard in frequency (by 10%). In addition to sensory responses, deviant sounds elicited an ERP index of automatic sound-change discrimination, the mismatch negativity, and an ERP index of attentional orienting, the P3a. The sensory sound processing was intact in the highfunctioning children with autism and was not affected by sound complexity or ''speechness.'' In contrast, their involuntary orienting was affected by stimulus nature. It was normal to both simpleand complex-tone changes but was entirely abolished by vowel changes. These results demonstrate that, first, auditory orienting deficits in autism cannot be explained by sensory deficits and, second, that orienting deficit in autism might be speech-sound specific.A utism (1) is a severely debilitating developmental disorder, characterized by aberrant social skills, deficient language, abnormal attention, stereotyped repetitive behaviors, and often also mental retardation.One of the components of the social communication deficits in autism is peculiar attentional behavior. Individuals with autism show attentional preference to objects over people and a lack of a drive to communicate (2). Consistent with this, Swettenham et al. (3) found that 20-month-old infants with autistic features made significantly fewer attention shifts than did their controls from person to person and between a person and an object. They also spent more time looking at objects and less time looking at people. Further, 5-year-old children with autism oriented more poorly to social (both speech and nonspeech) than to nonsocial stimuli (4). Their impaired orienting to social stimuli correlated with the impairment of joint attention, one of the key features of autism.The neurofunctional deficits underlying this pattern of behavior are not yet understood, although recent research revealed disorders in many aspects of attentional behavior in autism. They include abnormalities in spontaneous looking (3), focused attention (5-11), and voluntary shifting of attention (12)(13)(14). Courchesne et al. (12) proposed that the majority of the attentional deficits observed in autism might be caused by a cerebellar dysfunction that slows down the adaptation of the neural systems to the const...

Deviant gaze processing in children with autism: an ERP study

“…On the other hand, several previous ERP researches have also found that the ERPs of children with autism failed to show differences between face and non-facial object , between familiar and unfamiliar faces , or between different vowels (Ceponiene et al, 2003), which concurs with current ERP results. Such a lack of sensitivity in children with autism to perceived mutual gaze and other critical social signals may correspond to their lack of interest in social stimuli (Baranek, 1999;Baron-Cohen, 1995), and might relate to atypical social cognitive development (Baron-Cohen, 1995).…”

“…Because atypical orienting to social stimuli in individuals with autism has been reported (Ceponiene et al, 2003;Dawson, Meltzoff, Osterling, Rinaldi, & Brown, 1998), it was predicted that ERPs corresponding to active detection of change in gaze direction are deviant in individuals with autism.…”

The Relationship Between Auditory Processing and Restricted, Repetitive Behaviors in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorders

“…Under this view, the preference for insistence to sameness and the repetitive behaviours people with ASD display are thought to relate to their hyper/hypo sensitivities to detect change. Studies in preattentional auditory novelty detection and pre-attentive neural responses (e.g., MMN) in children with ASD have provided evidence of enhanced (Ferri et al, 2003), intact (Ceponiene et al, 2003;Kamner, Verbaten, Cuperus, Camfferman, and van Engeland, 1995) and reduced (Gomot et al, 2006;Seri, Cerquiglini, Pisani, and Curatolo, 1999) frequency detection. A similar pattern of results is also evident in the findings across the studies on low-level discrimination ability in ASD.…”

Visual mismatch negativity (vMMN): A review and meta-analysis of studies in psychiatric and neurological disorders

“…An inspiration for future vMMN studies is the aMMN study of Ceponiene et al (2003) showing that the MMN was normal for non-social stimuli, and it was considerably reduced in amplitude for speech-sound stimuli in children with ASD. In the same vein, Kuhl, Coffey-Corina, Padden, and Dawson (2005) found that children with ASD showed a normal-size aMMN to change in non-speech sound stimuli but showed no aMMN in response to change in speech syllables.…”