Background: Around 800 million young children worldwide have cognitive-developmental limitations due to issues related to biological, environmental, and psychosocial factors. These problems lead to educational challenges, limited skill development, and higher unemployment rates. Therefore, timely interventions addressing the underlying problems in…

Children with autism show alterations in multisensory integration that have been theoretically and empirically linked with the core and related features of autism. It is unclear, however, to what extent multisensory integration maps onto features of autism within children with and without autism. This study, thus, evaluates relations between…

Purpose: The "bouba-kiki" (BK) effect refers to associations between visual shapes and auditory pseudonames. Thus, when tested, people tend to associate the pseudowords "bouba" and "kiki" with round or spiky shapes, respectively. This association requires cross-modal sensory integration. The ability to integrate…

The present study examined the relationship between multisensory integration and the temporal binding window (TBW) for multisensory processing in adults with Autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The ASD group was less likely than the typically developing group to perceive an illusory flash induced by multisensory integration during a sound-induced…

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…

Previous studies have suggested audiovisual multisensory integration (MSI) may be atypical in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). However, much of the research having found an alteration in MSI in ASD involved socio-communicative stimuli. The goal of the current study was to investigate MSI abilities in ASD using lower-level stimuli that are not…

It has been recently theorized that atypical sensory processing in autism relates to difficulties in social communication. Through a series of tasks concurrently assessing multisensory temporal processes, multisensory integration and speech perception in 76 children with and without autism, we provide the first behavioral evidence of such a link.…

This article presents information on the impact of hyper or hypo-sensory responses and specific strategies that can balance the systems. We examine the five sensory systems (tactile, auditory, visual, proprioceptive, and vestibular), common behaviors associated with each system, and recommend instructional strategies designed to support student…

Although it has been established that human beings process concrete and abstract words differently, it is still a matter of debate what factors contribute to this difference. Since concrete concepts are closely tied to sensory perception, perceptual experience seems to play an important role in their processing. The present study investigated the…

Speech, reading, and writing are the basic forms of linguistic communication. Therefore, it is very important to diagnose any problems with them as early and completely as possible, particularly in children with special needs. One of the methods that focuses primarily on the diagnosis and therapy of such learning difficulties is the one developed…

Recent work on visual selective attention has shown that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) demonstrate an increased perceptual capacity. The current study examined whether increasing visual perceptual load also has less of an effect on auditory awareness in children with ASD. Participants performed either a high- or low load version…

Atypical communicative abilities are a core marker of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). A number of studies have shown that, in addition to auditory comprehension differences, individuals with autism frequently show atypical responses to audiovisual speech, suggesting a multisensory contribution to these communicative differences from their…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) exhibit alterations in sensory processing, including changes in the integration of information across the different sensory modalities. In the current study, we used the sound-induced flash illusion to assess multisensory integration in children with ASD and typically-developing (TD) controls.…

Human multisensory systems are known to bind inputs from the different sensory modalities into a unified percept, a process that leads to measurable behavioral benefits. This integrative process can be observed through multisensory illusions, including the McGurk effect and the sound-induced flash illusion, both of which demonstrate the ability of…

Audio-visual integration was studied in children aged 8-17 (N = 30) and adults (N = 22) using the "flash-beep illusion" paradigm, where the presentation of two beeps causes a single flash to be perceived as two flashes ("fission" illusion), and a single beep causes two flashes to be perceived as one flash ("fusion" illusion). Children reported…