Acoustic Exaggeration Enhances Speech Discrimination in Young Autistic Children.

Child-directed speech (CDS), which amplifies acoustic and social features of speech during interactions with young children, promotes typical phonetic and language development. In autism, both behavioral and brain data indicate reduced sensitivity to human speech, which predicts absent, decreased, or atypical benefits of exaggerated speech signals such as CDS. This study investigates the impact of exaggerated fundamental frequency (F0) and voice-onset time on the neural processing of speech sounds in 22 Chinese-speaking autistic children aged 2-7 years old with a history of speech delays, compared with 25 typically developing (TD) peers.

Evaluation of a Visual Cognitive Style in Autism: A Cluster Analysis.

Cognitive style refers to how individuals perceive their environment and solve problems. Among various cognitive styles documented, verbal and visual styles, including object versus spatial cognition, have been widely studied. "Thinking in pictures" is often associated with autism and characterized by enhanced performance and autonomy of certain perceptual areas.

Integrating genomic variants and developmental milestones to predict cognitive and adaptive outcomes in autistic children.

Although the first signs of autism are often observed as early as 18-36 months of age, there is a broad uncertainty regarding future development, and clinicians lack predictive tools to identify those who will later be diagnosed with co-occurring intellectual disability (ID). Here, we developed predictive models of ID in autistic children (n=5,633 from three cohorts), integrating different classes of genetic variants alongside developmental milestones. The integrated model yielded an AUC ROC=0.

Enhanced interest in letters and numbers in autistic children.

Background: An intense and precocious interest in written material, together with a discrepancy between decoding and reading comprehension skills are defining criteria for hyperlexia, which is found in up to 20% of autistic individuals. It may represent the extreme end of a broader interest in written material in autism. This study examines the magnitude and nature of the interest in written material in a large population of autistic and non-autistic children.