Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Acoustic And Semantic Processing Of Speech And Non-Speech Sounds In Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders, Breanne D. Yerkes

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The processing of semantically meaningful non-speech and speech sounds requires the use of acoustic and higher-order information, such as categorical knowledge and semantic context. Individuals with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have been theorized to show enhanced processing of acoustic features and impaired processing of contextual information. The current study investigated how children with and without ASD use acoustic and semantic information during an auditory change detection task and semantic context during a speech-in-noise task. Furthermore, relationships among IQ, the presence of ASD symptoms and the use of acoustic and semantic information across the two tasks were examined among typically …