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Discrimination of temporal synchrony in intermodal events by children with autism and children with developmental disabilities without autism
Author(s) -
Bebko James M.,
Weiss Jonathan A.,
Demark Jenny L.,
Gomez Pamela
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
journal of child psychology and psychiatry
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.652
H-Index - 211
eISSN - 1469-7610
pISSN - 0021-9630
DOI - 10.1111/j.1469-7610.2005.01443.x
Subject(s) - autism , psychology , perception , developmental psychology , typically developing , language development , developmental disorder , cognitive psychology , audiology , neuroscience , medicine
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.