Purpose: Recent work suggests that speech perception is influenced by the somatosensory system and that oral sensorimotor disruption has specific effects on the perception of speech both in infants who have not yet begun to talk and in older children and adults with ample speech production experience; however, we do not know how such disruptions…

Autistic children (AC) show less audiovisual speech integration in the McGurk task, which correlates with their reduced mouth-looking time. The present study examined whether AC's less audiovisual speech integration in the McGurk task could be increased by increasing their mouth-looking time. We recruited 4- to 8-year-old AC and nonautistic…

Previous research has shown a relationship between robust neural encoding of speech by the auditory brainstem and children's phonological abilities. Two areas of brainstem encoding this work has included are the ABR dimensions of consistency, or how similar responses are to a repeated stimulus, and differentiation, or the degree to which responses…

Despite early differences in orienting to sounds, no study to date has investigated whether children with ASD demonstrate impairments in attentional disengagement in the auditory modality. Twenty-one 9-15-year-old children with ASD and 20 age- and IQ-matched TD children were presented with an auditory gap-overlap paradigm. Evidence of impaired…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) display differences in multisensory function as quantified by several different measures. This study estimated the stability of variables derived from commonly used measures of multisensory function in school-aged children with ASD. Participants completed: a simultaneity judgment task for audiovisual…

It has been demonstrated that children with specific language impairment (SLI) show difficulties not only with auditory but also with audiovisual speech perception. The goal of this study was to assess whether children with SLI might show reduced attention to the talker's mouth compared to their typically developing (TD) peers. An additional aim…

Children with learning disabilities can be as sharp as their peers; however, they may find it challenging to write, read, reason out information, spell things correctly, or process information. Due to this, it is critical for students to understand the ways of learning that suit them the best. They may not be aware of the different ways they can…

Nouns are fundamentally different from verbs semantically and syntactically, since verbs can specify one, two, or three nominal arguments. In this study, 25 children with Specific Language Impairment (age 5;3-8;2 years) and 50 typically developing children (3;3-8;2 years) participated in an eye-tracking experiment of spoken language comprehension…

Speech perception involves the integration of auditory and visual articulatory information, and thus requires the perception of temporal synchrony between this information. There is evidence that children with specific language impairment (SLI) have difficulty with auditory speech perception but it is not known if this is also true for the…

Methods used to assess children's speech perception and recognition in the clinical setting are out of step with current methods used to investigate these experimentally. Traditional methods of assessing speech discrimination, such as picture pointing, yield accuracy scores which may fail to detect subtle perceptual difficulties. This paper will…