Gender in Voice Perception in Autism

Abstract

Deficits in the perception of social stimuli may contribute to the characteristic impairments in social interaction in high functioning autism (HFA). Although the cortical processing of voice is abnormal in HFA, it is unclear whether this gives rise to impairments in the perception of voice gender. About 20 children with HFA and 20 matched controls were presented with voice fragments that were parametrically morphed in gender. No differences were found in the perception of gender between the two groups of participants, but response times differed significantly. The results suggest that the perception of voice gender is not impaired in HFA, which is consistent with behavioral findings of an unimpaired voice-based identification of age and identity by individuals with autism. The differences in response times suggest that individuals with HFA use different perceptual approaches from those used by typically developing individuals.

Vocal Identity Recognition in Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…Therefore, the participants in this experiment could easily reach the ceiling level if they were able to use these cues. Although our comparison of the performance of the ASD group and the performance of the control group in this experiment suffered from the ceiling effect, our finding that there was no significant difference between the two groups is consistent with a previous study, in which the gender of the voice fragments was parametrically morphed by shifting the formant ratio and median pitch of the male and female voices [15]. …”

“…Children with ASD also exhibit underconnectivity between the voice-selective cortex and reward pathways such as the dopaminergic reward pathway and the amygdala-related association learning system [14]. Nevertheless, individuals with ASD are found to perform similarly to NT individuals in discriminating gender in voice [15]. Research into vocal identity recognition has brought mixed results [16, 17], and research investigating emotion recognition in voices has also produced mixed findings [17–19].…”

Perceptual Compensation Is Correlated with Individuals' “Autistic” Traits: Implications for Models of Sound Change

“…As individuals with ASC are characterized by deficits in social cognition and communication, the present study investigated whether talker voice compensation would vary as a function of an individual's ability to incorporate socio-indexical information in speech processing. Despite findings that the perception of gender according to talker voice is not impaired in HFA children, their response time profiles are different from the matched controls [42]. It is also not clear whether individuals with high AQ can integrate talker voice information in perceptual normalization.…”

Do Parentese Prosody and Fathers' Involvement in Interacting Facilitate Social Interaction in Infants Who Later Develop Autism?

“…However, we were unable to find any study comparing interest in parentese versus other speech in children with autism. We know that (i) children with AD can process some aspects of human voices [42], although they display no specific cortical activation in response to human voices [43]; (ii) they do not show the expected preference for their mother's speech [44]; (iii) joint attention and immediate imitation appear to be important for setting the stage for early language acquisition in AD while representational skills (toy play, deferred attention) contribute to the expansion of communication skills [45]; (iv) also, children with AD fail to orient to naturally occurring social stimuli such as name called and hand clapping [46].…”