Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often exhibit disordered speech prosody, but sources of disordered prosody remain poorly understood. We explored patterns of temporal alignment and prosodic grouping in a speech-based metronome repetition task as well as manual coordination in a drum tapping task among Cantonese speakers with ASD and…

Understanding that people's ideas may be false is a challenging step in Theory of Mind (ToM) development, which is accomplished around the age of 4-5 years old by typically developing (TD) children. False-belief attribution remains difficult beyond this age for certain clinical populations, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), where delays in…

Previous studies report that minimally verbal children with autism spectrum disorder show impaired picture comprehension when matched to typically developing controls on language comprehension. Here, we compare "both" picture comprehension and picture production abilities in linguistically delayed children with autism spectrum disorder…

A study is reported which tests the proposition that faces capture the attention of those with autism spectrum disorders less than a typical population. A visual search task based on the Face-in-the-Crowd paradigm was used to examine the attentional allocation of autism spectrum disorder adults for faces. Participants were required to search for…

Diminished social attention is often considered to be a central deficit in autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). We further investigate this hypothesis by measuring the distracting power of social and non-social stimuli in the context of a Stroop task among children with ASD and typically developing controls (TDCs). Our results show that Stroop…

Children with autism spectrum disorder present with a variety of social communication deficits such as atypicalities in social gaze and verbal and non-verbal communication delays as well as perceptuo-motor deficits like motor incoordination and dyspraxia. In this study, we had the unique opportunity to study praxis performance in deaf children…

Thirty-four children, with autism spectrum disorders, ages 4-14 years, were matched and randomly assigned to one of two conditions for learning a novel juice-making task and producing two novel words about the event. Seventeen sighted children were manually guided to perform the task and tactually prompted during imitated productions of novel…

Background: Research has shown that children born very prematurely are at substantially elevated risk for social and behavioral difficulties similar to those seen in full-term children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Methods: To gain insight into core deficits that may underlie these difficulties, in this study, we assessed the social…

Atypical perception in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) is well documented (Dakin & Frith, 2005). However, relatively little is known about colour perception in ASD. Less accurate performance on certain colour tasks has led some to argue that chromatic discrimination is reduced in ASD relative to typical development (Franklin, Sowden, Burley,…

Considerable research effort has been dedicated to exploring how well children with autistic spectrum disorders infer eye gaze direction from the face of an actor. Here we combine task performance (accuracy to correctly label a target item) and eye movement information ("where" the participant fixates when completing the task) to understand more…

The goal of the current study was to examine the contribution of three early social skills that may provide a foundation for cooperative performance in autism: (1) imitation, (2) joint attention, and (3) understanding of other people's intentions regarding actions on objects. Fourteen children with autistic disorder (AD) and 15 children with other…

Language delay and impairment are salient features of autism. More specifically, there is evidence of atypical semantic organization in autism, but the functional brain correlates are not well understood. The current study used functional MRI to examine activation associated with semantic category decision. Ten high-functioning men with autism…