Multisensory speech perception in autism spectrum disorder: From phoneme to whole-word perception.
Ryan A Stevenson, Sarah H Baum, Magali Segers and 3 others
PMID 28339177WHAT IT FOUND
Autistic children recognized speech less accurately than peers, especially whole words in noise.
Seeing the mouth still helped identify individual speech sounds, but whole-word benefit was smaller at the hardest noise level.
Key findings
01Autistic children were less accurate than typically developing children at whole-word recognition from sound alone and from sound plus video.
02Seeing the speaker's mouth helped both groups identify individual speech sounds more than their sound-only and mouth-only performance predicted, and this help did not differ significantly between groups.
03At -18 dB SPL, typically developing children showed significantly more whole-word benefit from seeing the speaker's mouth than autistic children.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
No treatment was tested. The study included only children and teenagers aged 6 to 18 years. The sample was not large enough for detailed age analysis, as the authors state. Whole-word and phoneme scores are linked, which the authors note raises the risk of false-positive findings and makes null results harder to interpret. The words were spoken by a single female speaker and were short, familiar nouns, so everyday conversation may differ.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that seeing a speaker's mouth is unhelpful for autistic children. The study found reduced whole-word benefit only at the hardest noise level, while phoneme-level benefit was not significantly different between groups.