Phonological Processing in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex of neurodevelopmental disorders characterized by deficit in social interaction and presence of stereotyped behavior as well as intellectual problems and speech delay. In the present study, we examined phonological processing in children with ASD. We used a nonword repetition, a phoneme detection and a phonological discrimination tasks. 19 children with ASD (aged 7.2-11.8, Mage = 9.9, SD = 1.3) and 19 typically developing children (aged 7.4-11.3 лет, Mage = 9.9, SD = 1.1) participated in our study. The group comparison in accuracy between ASD and TD was performed for each test using generalized linear mixed-effects models. The models included factors such as group (ASD vs. TD), age of children, and number of syllables. Also, we used linear regression models to reveal correlation between accuracy and Age/non-verbal IQ. The results showed a significant group effect, i.e. children with ASD made more errors than TD children in two of the tests: phoneme detection and nonword repetition. The length of stimuli did not affect the accuracy of performing the tasks. The age and IQ factors also did not correlate with the accuracy.