Autism
Do autistic children look at a talker's mouth when they need to?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
When listening to speech in noise, autistic children looked less at the talker's face and much less at the mouth than matched peers, instead lingering on uninformative parts of the face.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Case-control — Matched-group eye-tracking study: children watched syllables in auditory noise and silently (lipreading) plus a non-speech moving-shape control; gaze to face, mouth and non-focal regions analysed in 300 ms time bins.
- N
- N=20 · 20 verbal children: 10 with ASD and 10 typically developing controls matched on sex, age, cognitive and language scores (three ASD children were excluded for looking too little at the face).
- Population
- Monolingual English-speaking verbal school-age children with autism spectrum diagnoses, and matched typically developing peers.
- Outcome
- Percentage of looking time on the face, and within the face on the mouth region versus non-focal regions (cheeks, forehead, ears).
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Key findings
Autistic children spent less time on the face than controls in the noise task (about 61% vs 82% of on-screen time), with a smaller, marginal difference when lipreading. Of their face-looking time, they spent about half as much on the mouth in noise (26% vs 53%) and more on non-focal areas; typically developing children shifted to the mouth as the articulation unfolded, but autistic children did not in noise, though they showed a weaker version of this shift when lipreading. Gaze to the non-speech shapes did not differ between groups.
Methodology
Ten verbal children with autism and ten matched typically developing children watched a man say 'ma' or 'na', either with loud background noise or with the sound removed so they had to lipread, and reported what they perceived. A remote eye-tracker recorded where they looked across each 1.5-second syllable. As a control, they also watched figure-eight shapes that grew and shrank in time with the syllables, paired with tone-like sounds.
Limitations
With only ten children per group, a wide age range and mixed diagnoses (autism, Asperger syndrome, PDD-NOS), the estimates are imprecise, as the authors caution. Three autistic children were excluded for looking too little at the face, so the sample may underrepresent those with the most atypical gaze. Stimuli were single syllables from one male speaker, not natural sentences, and the study cannot tell whether reduced mouth-looking causes the weaker audiovisual speech perception or whether processing differences also play a role.
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