Mental representations of speech and musical pitch contours reveal a diversity of profiles in autism spectrum disorder

Wang, L., Ong, J. H. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1503-8311, Ponsot, E., Hou, Q., Jiang, C. and Liu, F. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7776-0222 (2022) Mental representations of speech and musical pitch contours reveal a diversity of profiles in autism spectrum disorder. Autism. ISSN 1362-3613 doi: 10.1177/13623613221111207

Abstract/Summary

As an information-bearing auditory attribute of sound, pitch plays a crucial role in the perception of speech and music. Studies examining pitch processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have produced equivocal results. To understand this discrepancy from a mechanistic perspective, we used a novel data-driven method, the reverse-correlation paradigm, to explore whether the equivocal findings in ASD have high-level origins in top-down comparisons of internal mental representations of pitch contours. Thirty-two Mandarin-speaking autistic individuals and 32 non-autistic individuals undertook three subtasks testing mental representations of pitch contours in speech, complex tone, and melody, respectively. The results indicate that while the two groups exhibited similar representations of pitch contours across the three conditions, the ASD group showed a significantly higher intra-group variability than the non-ASD group. In addition, the two groups did not differ significantly in internal noise, a measure of the robustness of participant responses to external variability, suggesting that the present findings translate genuinely qualitative differences and similarities between groups in pitch processing. These findings uncover for the first time that pitch patterns in speech and music are mentally represented in a similar manner in autistic and non-autistic individuals, through domain-general top-down mechanisms.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/105731
Item Type	Article
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Interdisciplinary Research Centres (IDRCs) > Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Neurodynamics (CINN) Interdisciplinary centres and themes > ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorders) Research Network Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Department of Psychology Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Language and Cognition Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Perception and Action
Publisher	Sage
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