Brain activations while processing degraded speech in adults with autism spectrum disorder

NEUROPSYCHOLOGIA

卷:152

Article

Lin, I-Fan^1,2,3  Itahashi, Takashi⁴  Kashino, Makio^1,5,6  Kato, Nobumasa⁴  Hashimoto, Ryu-ichiro^4,7 

[1] NTT Corp, Commun Sci Labs, Atsugi, Kanagawa 2430124, Japan

[2] Taipei Med Univ, Dept Med, Taipei 11031, Taiwan

[3] Shuang Ho Hosp, Dept Occupat Med, New Taipei 23561, Taiwan

[4] Showa Univ, Karasuyama Hosp, Med Inst Dev Disabil Res, Tokyo 1578577, Japan

[5] Tokyo Inst Technol, Sch Engn, Yokohama, Kanagawa 2268503, Japan

[6] Univ Tokyo, Grad Sch Educ, Tokyo 1130033, Japan

[7] Tokyo Metropolitan Univ, Dept Language Sci, Tokyo 1920364, Japan

关键词: Autism spectrum disorder;    Vocoded speech;    Degraded speech;    Speech perception;    Dorsal stream;   

DOI  :  10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2021.107750

来源: Elsevier

【 摘 要 】

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are found to have difficulties in understanding speech in adverse conditions. In this study, we used noise-vocoded speech (VS) to investigate neural processing of degraded speech in individuals with ASD. We ran fMRI experiments in the ASD group and a typically developed control (TDC) group while they listened to clear speech (CS), VS, and spectrally rotated VS (SRVS), and they were requested to pay attention to the heard sentence and answer whether it was intelligible or not. The VS used in this experiment was spectrally degraded but still intelligible, but the SRVS was unintelligible. We recruited 21 right-handed adult males with ASD and 24 age-matched and right-handed male TDC participants for this experiment. Compared with the TDC group, we observed reduced functional connectivity (FC) between the left dorsal premotor cortex and left temporoparietal junction in the ASD group for the effect of task difficulty in speech processing, computed as VS-(CS + SRVS)/2. Furthermore, the observed reduced FC was negatively correlated with their Autism-Spectrum Quotient scores. This observation supports our hypothesis that the disrupted dorsal stream for attentive process of degraded speech in individuals with ASD might be related to their difficulty in understanding speech in adverse conditions.

【 授权许可】

Free