Abstract
Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are pervasive neurodevelopmental disorders involving a number of deficits to linguistic cognition. The gap between genetics and the pathophysiology of ASD remains open, in particular regarding its distinctive linguistic profile. The goal of this article is to attempt to bridge this gap, focusing on how the autistic brain processes language, particularly through the perspective of brain rhythms. Due to the phenomenon of pleiotropy, which may take some decades to overcome, we believe that studies of brain rhythms, which are not faced with problems of this scale, may constitute a more tractable route to interpreting language deficits in ASD and eventually other neurocognitive disorders. Building on recent attempts to link neural oscillations to certain computational primitives of language, we show that interpreting language deficits in ASD as oscillopathic traits is a potentially fruitful way to construct successful endophenotypes of this condition. Additionally, we will show that candidate genes for ASD are overrepresented among the genes that played a role in the evolution of language. These genes include (and are related to) genes involved in brain rhythmicity. We hope that the type of steps taken here will additionally lead to a better understanding of the comorbidity, heterogeneity, and variability of ASD, and may help achieve a better treatment of the affected populations.
Highlights
Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are pervasive neurodevelopmental disorders involving several social and cognitive deficits
Once ASD is seen as an oscillopathy, and once brain dynamics can be shown to be a plausible candidate for linguistic computation (Murphy, 2015b), various predictions can be generated about the etiology of language-related disorders, and our understanding of language deficits in ASD and why language in ASD subjects is construed differently will surely develop
ASD is of particular interest in virtue of it representing a mode of cognition and perception distinct from, but plainly related to, normally functioning linguistic cognition
Summary
Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are pervasive neurodevelopmental disorders involving several social and cognitive deficits. ASD involves atypical brain wiring during growth, which results in its distinctive cognitive profile, and which has been linked or associated to mutations in an extensive number of genes (Veenstra-VanderWeele and Cook, 2004). Recent advances in genome-wide technology have resulted in a long list of candidate genes for this condition (Geschwind and State, 2015). They point to specific pathways and neural mechanisms underlying its associated deficits (Willsey and State, 2015), the gap between the pathophysiology of ASD and genes still remains open, in particular regarding its distinctive linguistic profile (see Jeste and Geschwind, 2014 for discussion)
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