Mental representations of speech and musical pitch contours reveal a diversity of profiles in autism spectrum disorder

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Wang, L, Ong, JH ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1503-8311, Ponsot, E, Hou, Q, Jiang, C and Liu, F, 2023. Mental representations of speech and musical pitch contours reveal a diversity of profiles in autism spectrum disorder. Autism, 27 (3), pp. 629-646. ISSN 1362-3613

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613221111207

Abstract

As an information-bearing auditory attribute of sound, pitch plays a crucial role in the perception of speech and music. Studies examining pitch processing in autism spectrum disorder have produced equivocal results. To understand this discrepancy from a mechanistic perspective, we used a novel data-driven method, the reverse-correlation paradigm, to explore whether the equivocal findings in autism spectrum disorder have high-level origins in top–down comparisons of internal mental representations of pitch contours. Thirty-two Mandarin-speaking autistic individuals and 32 non-autistic individuals undertook three subtasks testing mental representations of pitch contours in speech, complex tone and melody, respectively. The results indicate that while the two groups exhibited similar representations of pitch contours across the three conditions, the autistic group showed a significantly higher intra-group variability than the non-autistic group. In addition, the two groups did not differ significantly in internal noise, a measure of the robustness of participant responses to external variability, suggesting that the present findings translate genuinely qualitative differences and similarities between groups in pitch processing. These findings uncover for the first time that pitch patterns in speech and music are mentally represented in a similar manner in autistic and non-autistic individuals, through domain-general top–down mechanisms.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Autism
Creators:	Wang, L., Ong, J.H., Ponsot, E., Hou, Q., Jiang, C. and Liu, F.
Publisher:	SAGE Publications
Date:	April 2023
Volume:	27
Number:	3
ISSN:	1362-3613
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1177/13623613221111207 DOI 2418467 Other
Rights:	This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Jonathan Gallacher
Date Added:	31 Mar 2025 15:40
Last Modified:	31 Mar 2025 15:40
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/53332