Synchrony Detection of Linguistic Stimuli in the Presence of Faces: Neuropsychological Implications for Language Development in ASD

ABSTRACT

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) may be impaired in their ability to detect audiovisual synchrony and their ability may be influenced by the nature of the stimuli. We investigated the possibility that synchrony detection is disrupted by the presence of human faces by testing children with ASD using a preferential looking language-based paradigm. Children with low language abilities were significantly worse at detecting synchrony when the stimuli include an unobscured face than when the face was obscured. Findings suggest that the presence of faces may make multisensory processing more difficult. Implications for interventions are discussed, particularly those targeting attention to faces.

Notes

1. Bahrick et al. (2010) also found that children on the spectrum failed to detect synchrony in the nonsocial condition, a finding inconsistent with other research. However, all three groups (typical, ASD, and developmentally delayed) appear to have performed much worse in the nonsocial condition; therefore, there may be other factors accounting for that particular finding.

2. A previous study assessed the correlation between frame-by-frame (30 frames per second) coding compared with a 500-millisecond frame coding yielding a Pearson’s correlation of .991, p = .001 (Patten et al., 2014). In addition, for this study, 20% of the trials were coded using Action Analysis Coding and Training (AACT) software (Delgado, 2008). AACT displays visual, spectral and auditory information and allows for frame-by-frame coding. The correlation for the two methods (500-millisecond clip coding and frame-by-frame coding) was quite high at r = .97.