Poster #48 - Do autistic adolescents with language impairments and auditory filtering issues orient to their own name?

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - Developmental Disabilities

Integrative Statement

Behavioral and neural data show that typically developing children orient to their own name in noise as early as the first year of life (Newman et al., 2005; Key et al., 2016). However, failure to orient to own name is one of the earliest signs of autism. Little research has been conducted to consider whether these deficits persist across the lifespan and how they might be related to other phenotypic characteristics including language impairments and auditory filtering skills. Moreover, prior research suggests that failure to separate sounds into relevant and irrelevant streams is a problem in autism and reflects an auditory filtering deficit that can disrupt normal acquisition of receptive language (Russo et al., 2009). In earlier work, we found that neural correlates indexing the strength of passive auditory stream separation of tones correlated significantly with receptive language (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, PPVT-4; Dunn & Dunn, 2007) and auditory filtering skills (Short Sensory Profile, SSP; McIntosh, Miller, & Shyu, 1999) in minimally verbal adolescents with autism (Wang et al., in prep). Here, we measured neural response to own name in comparison to unfamiliar names heard passively amidst multispeaker background noise in adolescents with autism, with participants ranging widely in expressive language abilities, from minimally verbal to verbally fluent (N=29). We sought to characterize the relationship between neural measures of orienting response (N1, P3) and the same previously explored measures of receptive language and auditory filtering. In particular, we looked at the early orienting N1 response in frontal-central electrode FCz between 150 and 200 ms and the late orienting P3 response in the parietal-occipital electrode Oz between 500 and 600 ms. Data were preprocessed and z-scored relative to resting state (collected at 5-second increments throughout the experiment). Analyses included all participants with 90 to 162 usable trials per condition and stimulus. We found a negative correlation between receptive language and ERP amplitude N1 to own name (r=-0.54, p<0.01) but not to other names. We also found that auditory filtering score positively correlated with the ERP amplitude of the P3 response to own name (r=0.48, p<0.01) but again, not to other names. These results show that early orienting response to own name is weaker in those with poorer receptive language skills. In addition, late orienting response to own name is weaker in those with more severe auditory filtering deficits. Findings suggest that neural orienting response to own name in noise, while typically present in children from a very young age, varies as a function of receptive language and auditory filtering behaviors in adolescents with autism. Future data collection will continue to assess these findings and their implications for understanding potential underlying factors that contribute to life-long language disorders in autism.

Authors

• Sophie Schwartz, Boston University
  Presenting Author

• Barbara Shinn-Cunningham, Carnegie Mellon University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Helen Tager-Flusberg, Boston University
  Non-Presenting Author