Language And Audiovisual Speech Perception In Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders Asd

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have deficits in social communication. Current social communication measures include joint attention as part of diagnostic criteria for ASD. Since joint attention can involve spoken language, both auditory and visual inputs must be considered in its evaluation. Objective measures, such as event related potentials (ERP) allow for the measurement of brain responses to different sensory information like auditory (voices) and visual (faces) stimuli. In this paper, ERP (N1 and P2) responses to a speaking face with a visible mouth (AudioVisual, AV) and one with a covered (pixelated) mouth (pixilated, PX) were analyzed for a group of typically developing (TD) participants (N = 10) and participants with ASD (N = 10) (Figure 1: shows images of the two conditions). In addition, the relationships between language and vocabulary scores and N1 and P2 responses were explored. Results indicated no significant group differences for listening condition (AV and PX) for the N1 or P2 response (Figure 2: shows the means and standard deviations for the ERP response to /a/ for the PX and AV conditions), suggesting that children with ASD and those with TD do not differ in processing these signals at the level of the auditory cortex. Moreover, children with ASD did not show differences in ERP response between the AV and PX conditions suggesting no influence of visual speech input on speech sound processing. Finally, the language measures used in this study did not significantly correlate to N1 or P2 amplitudes (Figure 3: shows mean scores and standard deviations for language and cognitive assessments), suggesting no relationship between the language skills and ERP response to AV speech.