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Pitch Processing in Tonal-Language-Speaking Children with Autism: An Event-Related Potential Study

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Abstract

The present study investigated pitch processing in Mandarin-speaking children with autism using event-related potential measures. Two experiments were designed to test how acoustic, phonetic and semantic properties of the stimuli contributed to the neural responses for pitch change detection and involuntary attentional orienting. In comparison with age-matched (6–12 years) typically developing controls (16 participants in Experiment 1, 18 in Experiment 2), children with autism (18 participants in Experiment 1, 16 in Experiment 2) showed enhanced neural discriminatory sensitivity in the nonspeech conditions but not for speech stimuli. The results indicate domain specificity of enhanced pitch processing in autism, which may interfere with lexical tone acquisition and language development for children who speak a tonal language.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by grants from the Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC 31271086), and key project from the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province, China (2014A030311016) to Suiping Wang. Zhang was supported by an autism initiative award from the Department of Pediatrics, and a Brain Imaging Research Project Award from the College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota. We thank Yang Fan, Jian Huang, Xiaofeng Jie, Xiaoyun Wu, Xueqin Qian for their assistance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychology and Center for the Study of Applied Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631, China

    Luodi Yu, Zhizhou Deng & Suiping Wang

  2. Department of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA

    Luodi Yu & Yang Zhang

  3. Guangzhou Rehabilitation and Research Center for Children with Autism, Guangzhou Cana School, Guangzhou, 510540, China

    Yuebo Fan & Dan Huang

  4. Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631, China

    Suiping Wang

  5. Center for Neurobehavioral Development, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA

    Yang Zhang

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  1. Luodi Yu
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Yu, L., Fan, Y., Deng, Z. et al. Pitch Processing in Tonal-Language-Speaking Children with Autism: An Event-Related Potential Study. J Autism Dev Disord 45, 3656–3667 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-015-2510-x

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