Individuals with autism spectrum disorder had different patterns of brain connectivity between areas involved in speech processing, particularly in the parietal region, which is important for combining different sounds into speech objects.
Why Children With Autism May Experience Auditory Sensory Overload
The successful navigation of complex everyday environments with multiple sensory inputs—such as restaurants, busy streets, and other social settings—relies on the brain’s ability to organize the barrage of information into discrete perceptual objects on which cognitive processes, such as selective attention, can act.
Autism-Related Language Difficulties Tied to Involuntary Attention Capture
We examined data from individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing (TD) peers while they listened to both meaningful and meaningless sentences. ASD individuals show significantly stronger cortical responses to meaningless compared with meaningful speech in the same canonical language regions where TD individuals exhibit stronger responses to meaningful speech.
Measuring Children’s Ability to Hear Speech in Different Competing Backgrounds
Young children spend much of their day listening in noise. However, it is clear that, compared with adults, infants and children are highly susceptible to interference from competing background sounds.