Elsevier

Biological Psychiatry

Volume 68, Issue 4, 15 August 2010, Pages 345-351
Biological Psychiatry

Archival Report
No Neural Evidence of Statistical Learning During Exposure to Artificial Languages in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2010.01.011Get rights and content

Background

Language delay is a hallmark feature of autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The identification of word boundaries in continuous speech is a critical first step in language acquisition that can be accomplished via statistical learning and reliance on speech cues. Importantly, early word segmentation skills have been shown to predict later language development in typically developing (TD) children.

Methods

Here we investigated the neural correlates of online word segmentation in children with and without ASD with a well-established behavioral paradigm previously validated for functional magnetic resonance imaging. Eighteen high-functioning boys with ASD and 18 age- and IQ-matched TD boys underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while listening to two artificial languages (containing statistical or statistical + prosodic cues to word boundaries) and a random speech stream.

Results

Consistent with prior findings, in TD control subjects, activity in fronto-temporal-parietal networks decreased as the number of cues to word boundaries increased. The ASD children, however, did not show this facilitatory effect. Furthermore, statistical contrasts modeling changes in activity over time identified significant learning-related signal increases for both artificial languages in basal ganglia and left temporo-parietal cortex only in TD children. Finally, the level of communicative impairment in ASD children was inversely correlated with signal increases in these same regions during exposure to the artificial languages.

Conclusions

This is the first study to demonstrate significant abnormalities in the neural architecture subserving language-related learning in ASD children and to link the communicative impairments observed in this population to decreased sensitivity to the statistical and speech cues available in the language input.

Section snippets

Participants

Participants were recruited through flyers posted around the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) campus and the greater Los Angeles area as well as through referrals from the UCLA Autism Evaluation Clinic. Twenty-four high-functioning boys with ASD (12.62 ± 2.50 years) with normal full-scale IQ (FSIQ; 102.17 + 19.82) as assessed by the Wechsler Abbreviated Scales of Intelligence—Revised (WASI-R) (34) or Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children—3rd edition (WISC-III) (35) and 24 age-

Behavioral Results

Response times and accuracy on the postscan behavioral test are reported in Table S1 in Supplement 1. Children were not expected, on the basis of evidence from prior behavioral studies, to be able to explicitly identify whether these trisyllabic combinations were words in the artificial languages after such a short exposure to the streams (26, 42). Participants were unable to explicitly recognize trisyllabic word combinations from the artificial languages they heard during the exposure task,

Discussion

We found evidence of disrupted language network activity in children with ASD, consistent with previous investigations of language processing in autism (17, 18, 20, 21, 23, 24). Previous fMRI findings of word segmentation in healthy adults (32) revealed a consistent pattern of decreasing cortical activity within fronto-temporal-parietal networks as the number of cues to word boundaries increased from the R (minimal statistical cues) to the U (strong statistical cues) and S (strong statistical

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