Abstract
BackgroundAdults and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders show greater difficulties comprehending speech in the presence of noise. Moreover, while neurotypical adults use visual cues on the mouth to help them understand speech in background noise, differences in attention to human faces in autism may affect use of these visual cues. No work has yet examined these skills in toddlers with ASD, despite the fact that they are frequently faced with noisy, multitalker environments.MethodsChildren aged 2-5 years, both with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD), saw pairs of images in a preferential looking study and were instructed to look at one of the two objects. Sentences were presented in the presence of quiet or another background talker (noise). On half of the trials, the face of the target person speaking was presented, while half had no face present. Growth-curve modeling was used to examine the time course of children’s looking to the appropriate vs. opposite image.ResultsNoise impaired performance for both children with ASD and their age- and language-matched peers. When there was no face present on the screen, the effect of noise was generally similar across groups with and without ASD. But when the face was present, the noise had a more detrimental effect on children with ASD than their language-matched peers, suggesting neurotypical children were better able to use visual cues on the speaker’s face to aid performance. Moreover, those children with ASD who attended more to the speaker’s face showed better listening performance in the presence of noise.ConclusionsYoung children both with and without ASD show poorer performance comprehending speech in the presence of another talker than in quiet. However, results suggest that neurotypical children may be better able to make use of face cues to partially counteract the effects of noise. Children with ASD varied in their use of face cues, but those children who spent more time attending to the face of the target speaker appeared less disadvantaged by the presence of background noise, indicating a potential path for future interventions.
Highlights
Adults and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders show greater difficulties comprehending speech in the presence of noise
Participants Three groups of children participated in this study: (1) seventeen children who met criteria for autism spectrum on the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS-2) [51] conducted by a research-reliable administrator who was highly trained and experienced in assessing Autism spectrum disorders (ASD), and had been previously diagnosed clinically and had no known comorbidities; (2) seventeen typically developing children matched for chronological age (CA), and (3) thirteen typically developing children matched for language age (LA)
Face absent Our primary questions had to do with performance in the noise conditions: If children with ASD are hampered by background noise, we would expect them to show poorer looking than their peers in this condition
Summary
Adults and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders show greater difficulties comprehending speech in the presence of noise. Adolescents with ASD have been reported to show difficulties (1) discriminating high-frequency sounds [18], a critical skill for distinguishing fricatives such as /s/ and /∫/; (2) detecting silent gaps [18], which are crucial for identifying stop consonants; (3) attending to one sentence in the midst of distraction [19], which would likely impact their speech recognition in many real-world situations (such as classroom settings, where noise is a common occurrence [20, 21]) Their phonetic categorization appears to be less specialized for their native language [19]. All of these differences point to a pattern where individuals with ASD would be less likely to detect differences between speech sounds, in difficult listening conditions (see [14] for a review)
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