Under noisy listening conditions, visualizing a speaker's articulations substantially improves speech intelligibility. This multisensory speech integration ability is crucial to effective communication, and the appropriate development of this capacity greatly impacts a child's ability to successfully navigate educational and social settings. Research shows that multisensory integration abilities continue developing late into childhood. The primary aim here was to track the development of these abilities in children with autism, since multisensory deficits are increasingly recognized as a component of the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) phenotype. The abilities of high-functioning ASD children (n = 84) to integrate seen and heard speech were assessed cross-sectionally, while environmental noise levels were systematically manipulated, comparing them with age-matched neurotypical children (n = 142). Severe integration deficits were uncovered in ASD, which were increasingly pronounced as background noise increased. These deficits were evident in school-aged ASD children (5-12 year olds), but were fully ameliorated in ASD children entering adolescence (13-15 year olds). The severity of multisensory deficits uncovered has important implications for educators and clinicians working in ASD. We consider the observation that the multisensory speech system recovers substantially in adolescence as an indication that it is likely amenable to intervention during earlier childhood, with potentially profound implications for the development of social communication abilities in ASD children.

Introduction:Although dementia prevalence differs by race, it remains unclear whether cognition and neuropsychiatric symptom severity differ between Black and White individuals with dementia. Methods:Using National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center (NACC) data, we evaluated dementia prevalence in non-Hispanic Black and White participants and compared their clinicodemographic characteristics. We examined race differences in cognition, neuropsychiatric symptoms, and functional abilities in participants with dementia using multivariable linear and logistic regression models. Results:We included 5,700 Black and 31,225 White participants across 39 Alzheimer's Disease Research Centers. Of these, 1,528 (27%) Black and 11,267 (36%) White participants had dementia diagnoses. Despite having lower dementia prevalence, risk factors were more prevalent among Black participants. Black participants with dementia showed greater cognitive deficits, neuropsychiatric symptoms/severity, and functional dependence.Discussion: Despite lower dementia prevalence, Black participants with dementia had more dementia risk factors, as well as greater cognitive impairment and neuropsychiatric symptom severity than White participants.

Background: Previous work has revealed sizeable deficits in the abilities of children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to integrate auditory and visual speech signals, with clear implications for social communication in this population. There is a strong male preponderance in ASD, with approximately four affected males for every female. The presence of sex differences in ASD symptoms suggests a sexual dimorphism in the ASD phenotype, and raises the question of whether this dimorphism extends to ASD traits in the neurotypical population. Here, we investigated possible sexual dimorphism in multisensory speech integration in both ASD and neurotypical individuals.Methods: We assessed whether males and females differed in their ability to benefit from visual speech when target words were presented under varying levels of signal-to-noise, in samples of neurotypical children and adults, and in children diagnosed with an ASD.Results: In typically developing (TD) children and children with ASD, females (n = 47 and n = 15, respectively) were significantly superior in their ability to recognize words under audiovisual listening conditions compared to males (n = 55 and n = 58, respectively). This sex difference was absent in our sample of neurotypical adults (n = 28 females; n = 28 males).Conclusions: We propose that the development of audiovisual integration is delayed in male relative to female children, a delay that is also observed in ASD. In neurotypicals, these sex differences disappear in early adulthood when females approach their performance maximum and males “catch up.” Our findings underline the importance of considering sex differences in the search for autism endophenotypes and strongly encourage increased efforts to study the underrepresented population of females within ASD.