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Specificity of Phonological Representations for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

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Abstract

This study investigated whether children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are sensitive to mispronunciations of familiar words and compared their sensitivity to children with typical-development. Sixty-four toddlers with ASD and 31 younger, typical controls participated in a looking-while-listening task that measured their accuracy in fixating the correct object when it was labelled with a correct pronunciation versus mispronunciation. A cognitive style that prioritizes processing local, rather than global features, as claimed by the weak central coherence theory, predicts that children with ASD should be more sensitive to mispronunciations than typical controls. The results, however, reveal no differences in the effect of mispronunciations on lexical processing between groups, even when matched for receptive language or non-verbal cognitive skills.

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Notes

  1. Consensus coding to achieve 100% comparable trials is important because low numbers of comparable trials may bias the measures of inter-coder agreement, particularly if trials that are not comparable are more difficult to code.

  2. The combined numbers of children in the matched and unmatched subsamples are less than the total number of children in our full sample. This is because there were extra children within each group who were matchable (i.e., their scores were within the range of the other group), but were not matched with another child from the other Group.

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Acknowledgments

We sincerely thank the families and children who made this research possible. We thank Jessica Umhoefer and Heidi Sindberg for their clinical expertise. We also thank Tristan Mahr, Elizabeth Premo, Courtney Venker, and all other members of the Little Listeners Project team for their input and assistance.

Funding

This study was funded by an NIDCD Grant (RO1 DC012513) and an NICHD Core Grant to the Waisman Center (U54 HD090256).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Brogden Hall 1202, West Johnson Street, Madison, WI, 53706, USA

    Ron Pomper & Jenny Saffran

  2. Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1500 Highland Avenue, Madison, WI, 53705, USA

    Ron Pomper, Susan Ellis Weismer & Jenny Saffran

  3. Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Goodnight Hall, 1975 Willow Drive, Madison, WI, 53706, USA

    Susan Ellis Weismer

  4. Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, University of Maryland, Samuel J. LeFrak Hall, 7521 Preinkert Drive, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

    Jan Edwards

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Contributions

RP drafted the manuscript, performed the statistical analysis, and led in the analysis and interpretation of the data; JE conceived of the study, led in its design and coordination, participated in the interpretation of the data and helped to draft the manuscript; JS helped to conceive of the study and participated in the design and interpretation of the data; SEW helped to conceive of the study, participated in the design and interpretation of the data; and supervised the data collection. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Ron Pomper.

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Pomper, R., Ellis Weismer, S., Saffran, J. et al. Specificity of Phonological Representations for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. J Autism Dev Disord 49, 3351–3363 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-019-04054-5

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