Discrimination of temporal synchrony in intermodal events by children with autism and children with developmental disabilities without autism

Bebko, James M.
Weiss, Jonathan A.
Demark, Jenny L.
Gomez, Pamela

York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Correspondence to James Bebko, Department of Psychology, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M3J 1P3; Email: [email protected]

Manuscript accepted 2 November 2004

Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 47(1):p 88-98, January 2006.

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.