Abstract
Audiovisual (AV) integration deficits have been proposed to underlie difficulties in speech perception in Asperger’s syndrome (AS). It is not known, if the AV deficits are related to alterations in sensory processing at the level of unisensory processing or at levels of conjoint multisensory processing. Functional Magnetic-resonance images (MRI) was performed in 16 adult subjects with AS and 16 healthy controls (HC) matched for age, gender, and verbal IQ as they were exposed to disyllabic AV congruent and AV incongruent nouns. A simple semantic categorization task was used to ensure subjects’ attention to the stimuli. The left auditory cortex (BA41) showed stronger activation in HC than in subjects with AS with no interaction regarding AV congruency. This suggests that alterations in auditory processing in unimodal low-level areas underlie AV speech perception deficits in AS. Whether this is signaling a difficulty in the deployment of attention remains to be demonstrated.
Highlights
Speech perception under natural conditions relies on auditory and on visual information
Even after changing the significance threshold to p < 0.0001 (Bonferroni corrected for multiple comparisons) multiple significant clusters covering brain structures commonly involved in auditory and visual processing and attention functions were observed indicating the high impact of AV incongruency (Figure 1 and Table 2)
The main result of the study is a significant difference in activation for the main between-subjects factor (AS vs. healthy controls (HC))
Summary
Speech perception under natural conditions relies on auditory and on visual information. Autistic children have less benefit from AV information in speech perception of whole words whereas perception of phonemes is almost intact (Stevenson et al, 2017) The authors interpret their finding in the manner of affected sensory processing as origin for reduced multisensory abilities in autism. This may be reflected in atypical patterns of sensory responsiveness related to multisensory speech perception and integration problems (Feldman et al, 2018b). Otherwise differences within typical multisensory brain areas should be detected
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