The influence of background noise on the intermodal perception of speech in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Individuals with Autism often exhibit ineffective integration of information across auditory and visual modalities, and this deficit may be related to language impairments. This study used eye-tracking with a preferential looking design which involved displaying four videos on one screen with an auditory track synchronous to only one of the videos. Videos contained either linguistic (person telling a story) or non-linguistic (hand playing a piano) stimuli. Background noise was added and the signal to noise ratio was manipulated. Participants (28 total) included 14 typically developing (TD) children and 14 children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Results show that 1) with no background noise, the ASD group performed similar to the TD group in the non-linguistic condition, but not the linguistic condition; and 2) performance for the TD group decreased as the level of background noise increased. No trend was found for the ASD group.