Individuals with autism spectrum disorder are impaired in absolute but not relative pitch and duration matching in speech and song imitation

Should absolute pitch be considered as a unique kind of absolute sensory judgment in humans? A systematic and theoretical review of the literature

Absolute pitch is the name given to the rare ability to identify a musical note in an automatic and effortless manner without the need for a reference tone. Those individuals with absolute pitch can, for example, name the note they hear, identify all of the tones of a given chord, and/or name the pitches of everyday sounds, such as car horns or sirens. Hence, absolute pitch can be seen as providing a rare example of absolute sensory judgment in audition. Surprisingly, however, the intriguing question of whether such an ability presents unique features in the domain of sensory perception, or whether instead similar perceptual skills also exist in other sensory domains, has not been explicitly addressed previously. In this paper, this question is addressed by systematically reviewing research on absolute pitch using the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) method. Thereafter, we compare absolute pitch with two rare types of sensory experience, namely synaesthesia and eidetic memory, to understand if and how these phenomena exhibit similar features to absolute pitch. Furthermore, a common absolute perceptual ability that has been often compared to absolute pitch, namely colour perception, is also discussed. Arguments are provided supporting the notion that none of the examined abilities can be considered like absolute pitch. Therefore, we conclude by suggesting that absolute pitch does indeed appear to constitute a unique kind of absolute sensory judgment in humans, and we discuss some open issues and novel directions for future research in absolute pitch.

Using Pivotal Response Treatment to Improve Language Functions of Autistic Children in Special Schools: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Language difficulties exert profound negative effects on the cognitive and social development of autistic children. Pivotal Response Treatment (PRT) is a promising intervention for improving social communication in autistic children, but there is a lack of a comprehensive examination of language functions. This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of PRT in promoting the primary language functions (requesting, labeling, repeating, responding) defined by (Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal behavior. Martino Publishing.) theory of verbal behavior in autistic children. Thirty autistic children were randomly divided into the PRT group (Mage = 6.20, SDage = 1.21) and control group (Mage = 6.07, SDage = 1.49). The PRT group were provided with an 8-week training of the PRT motivation component in addition to treatment as usual (TAU) in their schools, whereas the control group only received TAU. Parents of the PRT group were also trained to practice the PRT motivation procedures at home. The PRT group demonstrated greater improvements in all four measured language functions compared to the control group. The improvement in language functions in the PRT group was generalized and maintained at the follow-up assessment. In addition, the PRT intervention enhanced untargeted social and communicative functioning, cognition, motor skills, imitation, and adaptive behaviors in the autistic children. In conclusion, language intervention using the motivation component of PRT is effective in promoting language functions as well as widespread untargeted cognitive and social functions in autistic children.

Predictive processing of music and language in autism: Evidence from Mandarin and English speakers

Atypical predictive processing has been associated with autism across multiple domains, based mainly on artificial antecedents and consequents. As structured sequences where expectations derive from implicit learning of combinatorial principles, language and music provide naturalistic stimuli for investigating predictive processing. In this study, we matched melodic and sentence stimuli in cloze probabilities and examined musical and linguistic prediction in Mandarin- (Experiment 1) and English-speaking (Experiment 2) autistic and non-autistic individuals using both production and perception tasks. In the production tasks, participants listened to unfinished melodies/sentences and then produced the final notes/words to complete these items. In the perception tasks, participants provided expectedness ratings of the completed melodies/sentences based on the most frequent notes/words in the norms. While Experiment 1 showed intact musical prediction but atypical linguistic prediction in autism in the Mandarin sample that demonstrated imbalanced musical training experience and receptive vocabulary skills between groups, the group difference disappeared in a more closely matched sample of English speakers in Experiment 2. These findings suggest the importance of taking an individual differences approach when investigating predictive processing in music and language in autism, as the difficulty in prediction in autism may not be due to generalized problems with prediction in any type of complex sequence processing.

Using music to assist language learning in autistic children with minimal verbal language: The MAP feasibility RCT

LAY ABSTRACT

Research has shown that autistic individuals often have unusually good musical skills and that combining words and music helps autistic individuals to focus on spoken words. This study tests the idea that music will help with early language learning of preschool autistic children. The results show that when caregivers sing words to autistic children, the children pay more attention to the caregiver than when the words are spoken and that they learn word combinations more easily.

Singing ability is related to vocal emotion recognition: Evidence for shared sensorimotor processing across speech and music

The ability to recognize emotion in speech is a critical skill for social communication. Motivated by previous work that has shown that vocal emotion recognition accuracy varies by musical ability, the current study addressed this relationship using a behavioral measure of musical ability (i.e., singing) that relies on the same effector system used for vocal prosody production. In the current study, participants completed a musical production task that involved singing four-note novel melodies. To measure pitch perception, we used a simple pitch discrimination task in which participants indicated whether a target pitch was higher or lower than a comparison pitch. We also used self-report measures to address language and musical background. We report that singing ability, but not self-reported musical experience nor pitch discrimination ability, was a unique predictor of vocal emotion recognition accuracy. These results support a relationship between processes involved in vocal production and vocal perception, and suggest that sensorimotor processing of the vocal system is recruited for processing vocal prosody.

Mental representations of speech and musical pitch contours reveal a diversity of profiles in autism spectrum disorder

LAY ABSTRACT

As a key auditory attribute of sounds, pitch is ubiquitous in our everyday listening experience involving language, music and environmental sounds. Given its critical role in auditory processing related to communication, numerous studies have investigated pitch processing in autism spectrum disorder. However, the findings have been mixed, reporting either enhanced, typical or impaired performance among autistic individuals. By investigating top-down comparisons of internal mental representations of pitch contours in speech and music, this study shows for the first time that, while autistic individuals exhibit diverse profiles of pitch processing compared to non-autistic individuals, their mental representations of pitch contours are typical across domains. These findings suggest that pitch-processing mechanisms are shared across domains in autism spectrum disorder and provide theoretical implications for using music to improve speech for those autistic individuals who have language problems.

A reversal of the song advantage in vocal pitch imitation

Previous experiments have documented an advantage for vocal pitch-matching when participants sing back a short melody, in contrast to when participants attempt to imitate the pitch contour of spoken English. These results appear to confirm recent claims that music involves greater precision of pitch than speech. A re-analysis of these data is reported here that focuses on imitation of pitch trajectories within sung notes or spoken syllables. When analyzed this way, the domain-based difference reverses and speech imitation exhibits an advantage relative to song imitation. These results suggest that domain-specific advantages in imitation vary as a function of timescale.