Discrimination of temporal synchrony in intermodal events by children with autism and children with developmental disabilities without autism.
J Child Psychol Psychiatry 2006;
47:88-98. [PMID:
16405645 DOI:
10.1111/j.1469-7610.2005.01443.x]
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Abstract
BACKGROUND
This project examined the intermodal perception of temporal synchrony in 16 young children (ages 4 to 6 years) with autism compared to a group of children without impairments matched on adaptive age, and a group of children with other developmental disabilities matched on chronological and adaptive age.
METHOD
A preferential looking paradigm was used, where participants viewed non-linguistic, simple linguistic or complex linguistic events on two screens displaying identical video tracks, but one offset from the other by 3 seconds, and with the single audio track matched to only one of the displays.
RESULTS
As predicted, both comparison groups demonstrated significant non-random preferential looking to violations of temporal synchrony with linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli. However, the group with autism showed an impaired, chance level of responding, except when presented with non-linguistic stimuli.
CONCLUSIONS
Several explanations are offered for this apparently autism-specific, language-specific pattern of responding to temporal synchrony, and potential developmental sequelae are discussed.
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