Behavioral Auditory Processing in Children and Young Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

Background Auditory-processing deficits are common in children and adults who are diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). These deficits are evident across multiple domains as exhibited by the results from subjective questionnaires from parents, teachers, and individuals with ASD and from behavioral auditory-processing testing. Purpose Few studies compare subjective and behavioral performance of adults and children diagnosed with ASD using commercially available tests of auditory processing. The primary goal of the present study is to compare the performance of adults and children with ASD to age-matched, neurotypical peers. The secondary goal is to examine the effect of age on auditory-processing performance in individuals with ASD relative to age-matched peers. Research Design A four-group, quasi-experimental design with repeated measures was used in this study. Study Sample Forty-two adults and children were separated into four groups of participants: (1) 10 children with ASD ages 14 years or younger; (2) 10 age-matched, neurotypical children; (3) 11 adolescents and young adults with ASD ages 16 years and older; and (4) 11 age-matched, neurotypical adolescents or young adults. Data Collection and Analysis Data from each participant were collected in one test session. Data were analyzed with analysis of variance (ANOVA), repeated measures ANOVA, or nonparametric analyses. Effect sizes were calculated to compare performance between those with ASD and those who were neurotypical within each age group. Results Across all the questionnaires and the majority of the behavioral test measures, participants with ASD had significantly poorer ratings or auditory-processing performance than age-matched, neurotypical peers. Adults had more favorable performance than children on several of the test measures. Medium to large effect sizes corroborated the significant results. Conclusion Overall, the questionnaires and behavioral tests used in this study were sensitive to detecting auditory-processing differences between individuals diagnosed with ASD and those who are considered neurotypical. On most test measures, children performed more poorly than adults. The findings in this study support that both children and adults with ASD exhibit auditory-processing difficulties. Appropriate school and work accommodations will be necessary to ensure appropriate access to speech in challenging environments.

Speech-in-noise perception in autistic adolescents with and without early language delay

“…While this may not be too surprising for the autistic adolescents with language delay, it is particularly striking that the verbally high performing ASD group (VIQ is 119 in the ASD group versus 115 in the TD group) fails on such a simple speech perception task. This confirms what we previously stated about apparent deficits in differentiating different speech streams in ASD (Bhatara et al, 2013;SPEECH-IN-NOISE PERCEPTION IN AUTISM 13 DePape et al, 2012;Dunlop et al, 2016;Emmons et al, 2021;Schafer et al, 2020;Stevenson et al, 2017). Yet, compared to the intact performance on the sentence-in-noise condition with temporal dips, this raises the question whether an additional factor of reduced attentional orienting toward social stimuli in ASD (Hedger et al, 2020), elicited by the secondary distracting speech stream, may underlie the poorer performance of autistic adolescents with intact language skills.…”

“…Previous literature on speech perception in a background of competing speech has shown that autistic individuals across multiple age-groups demonstrate severe difficulties in speech stream segregation (Bhatara et al, 2013;DePape et al, 2012;Dunlop et al, 2016;Emmons et al, 2021;Schafer et al, 2020;Stevenson et al, 2017). Also within this context of informational masking, temporal processing ability seems to modulate performance on these speech perception tasks (Bhatara et al, 2013).…”

Improving Emotion Perception in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder with Computer-Based Training and Hearing Amplification

“…This study was motivated by evidence that individuals with ASD experience significant auditory processing difficulties [19,20,26]. It was hypothesized that this affects discrimination of prosodic cues such as stress, pitch, and emotion, which hinders understanding of affective speech [4,8,99].…”

“…There are also limitations to using DPOAEs as a measure of hearing, as it is most reliable for identifying the presence of moderate to severe hearing loss and does not offer a continuous measure of hearing thresholds [97]. Children with autism are at risk for peripheral hearing loss [98] as well as auditory processing difficulties [20], however with this clinical population, it is important to reduce the complexity of task demands to ensure that the quality of the data is upheld. Although desirable, use of the gold-standard method of pure tone audiometric testing may not be feasible for all children with autism and hence, in the current study, we relied on parent report and objective DPOAE measurement to screen for moderate or greater hearing loss.…”

Altered population activity and local tuning heterogeneity in auditory cortex ofCacna2d3-deficient mice

“…Importantly, loss of function mutations of this gene have recently been identified as risk mutations for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in humans (Iossifov et al 2012; Girirajan et al 2013; De Rubeis et al 2014). As auditory deficits have been reported in people with ASD (Robertson and Baron-Cohen 2017; Vlaskamp et al 2017; Keehn et al 2019; Schafer et al 2020), studying activity patterns within the central auditory system of α 2 δ3 KO mice might provide more insight into the underlying sound processing defects.…”