Audiovisual speech perception in children with autism spectrum disorders and typical controls: Implications for development.

Abstract

For typically developing perceivers, visual speech information influences what listeners hear. For example, when the place of articulation of visual and auditory speech tokens are incongruent, perceivers often report hearing a visually influenced response (the McGurk effect; McGurk and MacDonald, 1976). To better understand the role of visual speech information in development, children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), children with typical development and adults with typical development were assessed on: (1) sensitivity to mismatched auditory and visual speech (McGurk); (2) visual gain in the presence of auditory noise; and (3) detection of auditory and visual asynchrony. Implications for the development of audiovisual speech processing in typically developing children and adults and children with ASD will be discussed. [Work supported by NIH.]