This study characterizes the subcortical auditory brainstem response (speech-ABR) and cortical auditory processing (P1 and Mismatch Negativity; MMN) to speech sounds and their relationship to autistic traits and sensory features within the same group of autistic children (n = 10) matched on age and non-verbal IQ to their typically developing (TD)…

The conclusions on prosodic pitch features in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have primarily been derived from studies in non-tonal language speakers. This cross-linguistic study evaluated the performance of imitating Cantonese lexical tones and their non-linguistic (nonspeech) counterparts by Cantonese- and Mandarin-speaking children with and…

Children with autism spectrum disorders have been reported to be less influenced by a speaker's face during speech perception than those with typically development. To more closely examine these reported differences, a novel visual phonemic restoration paradigm was used to assess neural signatures (event-related potentials [ERPs]) of audiovisual…

The provision of visual support to individuals with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is widely recommended. We explored one mechanism underlying the use of visual supports: efficiency of language processing. Two groups of children, one with and one without an ASD, participated. The groups had comparable oral and written language skills and…

The perception and the cerebral lateralization of spoken emotions were investigated in children and adolescents with high-functioning forms of autism (HFFA), and age-matched typically developing controls (TDC). A dichotic listening task using nonsense passages was used to investigate the recognition of four emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, and…

Many people with the diagnosis of Asperger syndrome (AS) show poorly developed skills in understanding emotional messages. The present study addressed discrimination of speech prosody in children with AS at neurophysiological level. Detection of affective prosody was investigated in one-word utterances as indexed by the N1 and the mismatch…