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Audiovisual Processing in Children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorders

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Abstract

Fifteen children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and twenty-one children without ASD completed six perceptual tasks designed to characterize the nature of the audiovisual processing difficulties experienced by children with ASD. Children with ASD scored significantly lower than children without ASD on audiovisual tasks involving human faces and voices, but scored similarly to children without ASD on audiovisual tasks involving nonhuman stimuli (bouncing balls). Results suggest that children with ASD may use visual information for speech differently from children without ASD. Exploratory results support an inverse association between audiovisual speech processing capacities and social impairment in children with ASD.

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Notes

  1. This token is a voiced dental fricative; the consonant is the initial consonant of “the”.

  2. The total number of trials presented on the Vowel Task should have been 48, but a computer glitch resulted in the presentation of only 47 trials. The missing trial was one of a number of a–v stimuli featuring a combination of audio /a/ and visual /a/. All other combinations of audio /a/ and visual /a/ were presented as intended.

  3. The Male/Female Face Classification Task was treated as separate from the AV Gender Match–Mismatch Task. Performance on the former was not co-varied out when analyzing performance on the latter, because the two tasks employed entirely different stimuli. The gender of the faces used in the AV Gender Match–Mismatch task was much more easily identifiable than the gender of the faces in the Male/Female Face Classification Task, because the former included color images in which the entire head, hair, etc. were clearly visible and the latter included black & white images in which the hair had been cropped out.

  4. The tasks are referred to collectively as “perceptual” rather than “cross-modal” because only five of the six were cross-modal. The Male Female Face Classification Task was unimodal, as it included only a visual component and no auditory component.

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Acknowledgments

Support for this research came from a grant (U19-HD35482) from the NICHD, as part of the Collaborative Programs of Excellence in Autism (CPEA). Drs. Irwin and Whalen were supported by NIH grant HD-01994. We also acknowledge our gratitude for the diagnostic assessments provide by Ami Klin, Fred Volkmar and Diane Goudreau, the ASD participant recruitment by Tammy Babitz, and the careful proofreading of our final draft provided by Roxanne Mongillo. Finally, we wish to thank the children and families who gave their time so generously to facilitate this research project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts Boston, 100 Morrissey Blvd., Boston, MA, 02125-3393, USA

    Elizabeth A. Mongillo & Alice S. Carter

  2. Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, CT, USA

    Julia R. Irwin & D. H. Whalen

  3. Yale School of Medicine Child Study Center, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Cheryl Klaiman & Robert T. Schultz

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  1. Elizabeth A. Mongillo
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  2. Julia R. Irwin
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  5. Alice S. Carter
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  6. Robert T. Schultz
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Correspondence to Elizabeth A. Mongillo.

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Mongillo, E.A., Irwin, J.R., Whalen, D.H. et al. Audiovisual Processing in Children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorders. J Autism Dev Disord 38, 1349–1358 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-007-0521-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-007-0521-y

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