Multisensory speech perception in autism spectrum disorder: From phoneme to whole‐word perception
Open accessAbstract
Speech perception in noisy environments is boosted when a listener can see the speaker's mouth and integrate the auditory and visual speech information. Autistic children have a diminished capacity to integrate sensory information across modalities, which contributes to core symptoms of autism, such as impairments in social communication. We investigated the abilities of autistic and typically‐developing (TD) children to integrate auditory and visual speech stimuli in various signal‐to‐noise ratios (SNR). Measurements of both whole‐word and phoneme recognition were recorded. At the level of whole‐word recognition, autistic children exhibited reduced performance in both the auditory and audiovisual modalities. Importantly, autistic children showed reduced behavioral benefit from multisensory integration with whole‐word recognition, specifically at low SNRs. At the level of phoneme recognition, autistic children exhibited reduced performance relative to their TD peers in auditory, visual, and audiovisual modalities. However, and in contrast to their performance at the level of whole‐word recognition, both autistic and TD children showed benefits from multisensory integration for phoneme recognition. In accordance with the principle of inverse effectiveness, both groups exhibited greater benefit at low SNRs relative to high SNRs. Thus, while autistic children showed typical multisensory benefits during phoneme recognition, these benefits did not translate to typical multisensory benefit of whole‐word recognition in noisy environments. We hypothesize that sensory impairments in autistic children raise the SNR threshold needed to extract meaningful information from a given sensory input, resulting in subsequent failure to exhibit behavioral benefits from additional sensory information at the level of whole‐word recognition. Autism Res 2017. © 2017 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Autism Res 2017, 10: 1280–1290. © 2017 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
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The ASD group shows reduced performance in both auditory and audiovisual modalities for whole-word recognition tasks with high SNRs compared with TD peers.
“The ASD group shows a reduced performance in both auditory and audiovisual modalities for whole-word recognition tasks with high SNRs (Stevenson et al. 2017), when compared with TD peers.”
From Autism Spectrum Disorder and auditory sensory alterations: a systematic review on the integrity of cognitive and neuronal functions related to auditory processing (2023) · cites this paper as Stevenson et al. 2017
ASD and NT groups exhibited greater benefit at low SNRs relative to high SNRs in phoneme recognition tasks.
“When different levels of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) are compared, ASD and NT groups exhibited greater benefit at low SNRs relative to high SNRs in phoneme recognition tasks (Stevenson et al. 2017).”
From Autism Spectrum Disorder and auditory sensory alterations: a systematic review on the integrity of cognitive and neuronal functions related to auditory processing (2023) · cites this paper as Stevenson et al. 2017
Children with ASD seem to possess a wider window of audiovisual temporal integration.
“Children with ASD seem to possess a wider window of audiovisual temporal integration (Stevenson et al. 2017; Noel et al. 2017), and higher auditory gap detection thresholds (Foss-Feig et al. 2017).”
From Autism Spectrum Disorder and auditory sensory alterations: a systematic review on the integrity of cognitive and neuronal functions related to auditory processing (2023) · cites this paper as Stevenson et al. 2017
The Scientific Abstract and Discussion describe audiovisual speech integration in autistic children, but neither reports the width of a temporal integration window. Searches for temporal binding windows and audiovisual timing found only references to other works, not a finding or discussion establishing this claim in the cited paper. (LLM, conf=0.76)
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Cited by
Sorted by citations
Robertson, C. E., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2017) · Nature Reviews Neuroscience · doi:10.1038/nrn.2017.112 · Cited by 1,157 · see citing works
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Approaches to Understanding Multisensory Dysfunction in Autism Spectrum Disorder
Siemann, J. K., Veenstra‐VanderWeele, J., & Wallace, M. T. (2020) · Autism Research · doi:10.1002/aur.2375 · Cited by 74 · see citing works
“In addition, studies have found that sensory disturbances correlate with greater deficits in social communication, along with the presence of more repetitive behaviors in individuals with ASD [Boyd et al., 2010; Boyd, McBee, Holtzclaw, Baranek, & Bodfish, 2009; Feldman et al., 2019; Foss-Feig, Heacock, & Cascio, 2012;…”
BackgroundSelf-citationAuditory Deficits in Audiovisual Speech Perception in Adult Asperger’s Syndrome: fMRI Study
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“Thus, autistic children have less benefit from AV information in speech perception of whole words whereas perception of phonemes is almost intact (Stevenson et al., 2017).”
Background
- Authors
- Stevenson, R. A., Baum, S. H., Segers, M., Ferber, S., Barense, M. D., & Wallace, M. T.
- Affiliations
- Western University (CA)
- University of Washington (US)
- York University (CA)
- University of Toronto (CA)
- Vanderbilt University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Stevenson, Ryan A.
- Venue
- Autism Research
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2017-03-24
- Volume
- 10
- Issue
- 7
- Pages
- 1280-1290
- ISSN
- 1939-3792 (ISSN-L)
- 1939-3806
- PMC
- PMC5513806
- OpenAlex
- W2602630889
- Cited by
- 82
- References
- 13
- Citations by year
- 2026: 7 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 12 · 2022: 6 · 2021: 7 · 2020: 9 · 2019: 10 · 2018: 7 · 2017: 8
- FWCI
- 12.11
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Autism Research (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (acceptedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- NSERC
- Simons Foundation
- Autism Speaks
- Vanderbilt Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (VR7263)
- National Institutes of Health (F32 DC011993, U54 HD083211, R34 DC010927, R21 CA1834892)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Multisensory perception and integration
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Autism Spectrum Disorder Research
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Phonetics and Phonology Research
- Keywords
- autism spectrum disorder, multisensory integration, audiovisual speech perception, speech perception in noise, phoneme recognition, whole-word recognition, signal-to-noise ratio, inverse effectiveness, sensory impairment, children with autism
- MeSH terms
- Autism Spectrum Disorder, Acoustic Stimulation, Adolescent, Child, Female, Humans, Male, Photic Stimulation, Speech Perception, Visual Perception, Recognition, Psychology
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