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Brief Report: Discrimination of Foreign Speech Pitch and Autistic Traits in Non-Clinical Population

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Abstract

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) are widely suggested to show enhanced perceptual discrimination but inconsistent findings have been reported for pitch discrimination. Given the high variability in ASC, this study investigated whether ASC traits were correlated with pitch discrimination in an undergraduate sample when musical and language experiences were taken into consideration. Results indicated that the social skills subscale of the Autism Spectrum Quotient was associated with foreign speech pitch discrimination, suggesting that individuals who were less sociable and socially skillful were less able to discriminate foreign speech pitch. Current findings have an implication in investigating individual differences in ASC and further investigation is needed for spelling out the relationship between the non-social and social aspects of ASC.

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Notes

  1. One semitone lower is a decrease in frequency of 6%. We used “one, two and three semitones” instead of “two, three and six semitones” that were used in Heaton et al. (2008b) and Mayer et al. (2016) because we reasoned that a harder task was needed to avoid an overall ceiling effect given that we tested university students rather than children, and had no restriction on musical experience.

  2. In Heaton et al. (2008b) and Mayer et al. (2016), this bias was not controlled and there were 20 more “different” trials than the “same” trials.

  3. Participants were never asked to compare pairs that differed in pitch contour. The contrast was always of different pitch levels (i.e., frequencies).

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Acknowledgments

We thank Richard Shelton for assisting in data collection and coding. We also thank all participants that took part in the study.

Funding

This study was partly supported by the SOC research funding awarded to Lai-Sang Iao from the School of Social Sciences, Nottingham Trent University.

Author Contributions

LSI conceived of the study, including its design, coordination and materials preparation, performed the statistical analysis, interpreted the data and drafted the manuscript; AW participated in conceiving the study and collecting data; YHL produced the stimuli and helped programming the experimental task and drafting the manuscript. All authors read and approved the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Nottingham Trent University, 50 Shakespeare Street, Nottingham, NG1 4FQ, UK

    Lai-Sang Iao & Anna Wippich

  2. Department of Educational and Psychological Studies, College of Education, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA

    Yu Hin Lam

Authors
  1. Lai-Sang Iao
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  2. Anna Wippich
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  3. Yu Hin Lam
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Correspondence to Lai-Sang Iao.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in the study involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee and with the British Psychological Society ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Iao, LS., Wippich, A. & Lam, Y.H. Brief Report: Discrimination of Foreign Speech Pitch and Autistic Traits in Non-Clinical Population. J Autism Dev Disord 48, 284–289 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-017-3298-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-017-3298-7

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