A quarterly publication of the Autism Research Institute
Summer, 2016 | Number 3, Volume 30
Individuals with high-functioning autism (HFA) have difficulty processing voices, a new study from Germany indicates.
The study, conducted by Stefanie Schelinski and colleagues, involved 16 individuals with HFA and 16 controls matched for gender, age, handedness, and IQ. The researchers evaluated participants’ performance on a variety of tests:
• A voice discrimination test, in which participants listened to two sentences and had to determine whether they were spoken by the same person or not.
• A voice-face learning test, in which participants heard the voices of three male and three female speakers, with each voice paired with a face, and then had to match the faces to the voices; and two similar experiments in which voices were paired with names or colors.
• A famous voice recognition test, in which participants listened to the voices of famous and non-famous people and had to categorize each voice as being familiar or not.
• Acoustic processing tests to measure participants’ ability to discriminate vocal pitch and timbre.
• Tests to evaluate participants’ musical pitch discrimination and musical instrument recognition.
• A test to measure participants’ ability to recognize faces.
The researchers report that participants with HFA had more difficulty than controls in determining whether two consecutive sentences were spoken by the same or different speakers. In addition, they had more difficulty learning unfamiliar voices. This was true whether they learned the voices together with a face, a name, or a color. However, the HFA group had no trouble recognizing famous voices.
The researchers also found that participants with HFA had diffi culty in discriminating vocal pitch (the highness or lowness of a tone) but not vocal timbre (sound characteristics independent of pitch or loudness). HFA participants and controls performed similarly on the musical pitch and musical instrument recognition tests. In the HFA group, difficulties in recognizing unfamiliar voices were associated with difficulties in recognizing unfamiliar faces.
Schelinski and colleagues conclude, “Lifelong perceptual impairments with vocal information might significantly exacerbate difficulties with social interaction—a core feature of ASD.” A dual impairment in voice and face recognition may be particularly limited, they add, since individuals would be unable to use one skill to compensate for impairments in the other.
“Voice identity processing in autism spectrum disorder,” Stefanie Schelinski, Claudia Roswandowitz, and Katharina von Kriegstein, Autism Research, July 12, 2016 (epub prior to print publication). Address: Stefanie Schelinski, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Stephanstraße 1a, 04103 Leipzig, Germany, [email protected].
