Search

Purpose: Reduced use of visible articulatory information on a speaker's face has been implicated as a possible contributor to language deficits in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We employ an audiovisual (AV) phonemic restoration paradigm to measure behavioral performance (button press) and event-related potentials (ERPs) of visual speech perception in children with ASD and their neurotypical peers to assess potential neural substrates that contribute to group differences. Method: Two sets of speech stimuli, /ba/-"/a/" ("/a/" was created from the /ba/ token by a reducing the initial consonant) and /ba/-/pa/, were presented within an auditory oddball paradigm to children aged 6-13 years with ASD (n = 17) and typical development (TD; n = 33) within two conditions. The AV condition contained a fully visible speaking face; the pixelated (PX) condition included a face, but the mouth and jaw were PX, removing all articulatory information. When articulatory features were present for the /ba/-"/a/" contrast, it was expected that the influence of the visual articulators would facilitate a phonemic restoration effect in which "/a/" would be perceived as /ba/. ERPs were recorded during the experiment while children were required to press a button for the deviant sound for both sets of speech contrasts within both conditions. Results: Button press data revealed that TD children were more accurate in discriminating between /ba/-"/a/" and /ba/-/pa/ contrasts in the PX condition relative to the ASD group. ERPs in response to the /ba/-/pa/ contrast within both AV and PX conditions differed between children with ASD and TD children (earlier P300 responses for children with ASD). Conclusion: Children with ASD differ in the underlying neural mechanisms responsible for speech processing compared with TD peers within an AV context.

Educational neuroscience approaches have helped to elucidate the brain basis of Reading Disability (RD) and of reading intervention response; however, there is often limited translation of this knowledge to the broader scientific and educational communities. Moreover, this work is traditionally lab-based, and thus the underlying theories and research questions are siloed from classroom practices. With growing awareness of the neurobiological origins of RD and increasing popularity of putative 'brain-based' approaches in clinics and classrooms, it is imperative that we create more direct and bidirectional communication between scientists and practitioners. Such direct collaborations can help dispel neuromyths, and lead to increased understanding of the promises and pitfalls of neuroscience approaches. Moreover, direct partnerships between researchers and practitioners can lead to greater ecological validity in study designs to improve upon the translational potential of findings. To this end, we have forged collaborative partnerships, and built cognitive neuroscience laboratories within independent reading disabilities schools. This approach affords frequent and ecologically valid neurobiological assessment as children's reading improves in response to intervention. It also permits the creation of dynamic models of leading and lagging relationships of students' learning, and identification of individual-level predictors of intervention response. The partnerships also provide in-depth knowledge of student characteristics and classroom practices, which, when combined with the data we acquire, may facilitate optimisation of instructional approaches. In this commentary, we discuss the creation of our partnerships, the scientific problem we are addressing (variable response to reading intervention), and the epistemological significance of researcher-practitioner bi-directional learning.

Children with autism spectrum disorders have been reported to be less influenced by a speaker's face during speech perception than those with typically development. To more closely examine these reported differences, a novel visual phonemic restoration paradigm was used to assess neural signatures (event-related potentials [ERPs]) of audiovisual processing in typically developing children and in children with autism spectrum disorder. Video of a speaker saying the syllable /ba/ was paired with (1) a synthesized /ba/ or (2) a synthesized syllable derived from /ba/ in which auditory cues for the consonant were substantially weakened, thereby sounding more like /a/. The auditory stimuli are easily discriminable; however, in the context of a visual /ba/, the auditory /a/ is typically perceived as /ba/, producing a visual phonemic restoration. Only children with ASD showed a large /ba/-/a/ discrimination response in the presence of a speaker producing /ba/, suggesting reduced influence of visual speech.

Comprehenders predict upcoming speech and text on the basis of linguistic input. How many predictions do comprehenders make for an upcoming word? If a listener strongly expects to hear the word "sock", is the word "shirt" partially expected as well, is it actively inhibited, or is it ignored? The present research addressed these questions by measuring the "downstream" effects of prediction on the processing of subsequently presented stimuli using the cumulative semantic interference paradigm. In three experiments, subjects named pictures (sock) that were presented either in isolation or after strongly constraining sentence frames ("After doing his laundry, Mark always seemed to be missing one…"). Naming sock slowed the subsequent naming of the picture shirt - the standard cumulative semantic interference effect. However, although picture naming was much faster after sentence frames, the interference effect was not modulated by the context (bare vs. sentence) in which either picture was presented. According to the only model of cumulative semantic interference that can account for such a pattern of data, this indicates that comprehenders pre-activated and maintained the pre-activation of best sentence completions (sock) but did not maintain the pre-activation of less likely completions (shirt). Thus, comprehenders predicted only the most probable completion for each sentence.

This study examined grammatical gender processing in school-aged children with varying levels of cumulative English exposure. Children participated in a visual world paradigm with a four-picture display where they heard a gendered article followed by a target noun and were in the context where all images were the same gender (same gender), where all of the distractor images were the opposite gender than the target noun (different gender), and where all of the distractor images were the opposite gender, but there was a mismatch in the gendered article and target noun pair. We investigated 51 children (aged 5;0– 10;0) who were exposed to Spanish since infancy but varied in their amount of cumulative English exposure. In addition to the visual word paradigm, all children completed an article–noun naming task, a grammaticality judgment task, and standardized vocabulary tests. Parents reported on their child’s cumulative English language exposure and current English language use. To investigate the time course of lexical facilitation effects, looks to the target were analyzed with a cluster-based permutation test. The results revealed that all children used gender in a facilitatory way (during the noun region), and comprehension was significantly inhibited when the article–noun pairing was ungrammatical rather than grammatical. Compared to children with less cumulative English exposure, children with more cumulative English exposure looked at the target noun significantly less often overall, and compared to younger children, older children looked at the target noun significantly more often overall. Additionally, children with lower cumulative English exposure looked at target nouns more in the different-gender condition than the same-gender condition for masculine items more than feminine items. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]