Multisensory integration of naturalistic speech and gestures in autistic adults

Seeing the speaker often facilitates auditory speech comprehension through audio-visual integration. This audio-visual facilitation is stronger under challenging listening conditions, such as in real-life social environments. Autism has been associated with atypicalities in integrating audio-visual...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Matyjek, Magdalena, Kita, Sotaro, Torralba Cuello, Mireia, Soto-Faraco, Salvador, 1970-
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2025
País:España
Institución:Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Repositorio:Repositorio Digital de la UPF
OAI Identifier:oai:dnet:rdupf_______::2b93d53bed9be33564dd5634af119def
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/10230/72940
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/aur.70042
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Audio-visual speech
Autism
EEG
Iconic gestures
Multisensory integration
Descripción
Sumario:Seeing the speaker often facilitates auditory speech comprehension through audio-visual integration. This audio-visual facilitation is stronger under challenging listening conditions, such as in real-life social environments. Autism has been associated with atypicalities in integrating audio-visual information, potentially underlying social difficulties in this population. The present study investigated multisensory integration (MSI) of audio-visual speech information among autistic and neurotypical adults. Participants performed a speech-in-noise task in a realistic multispeaker social scenario with audio-visual, auditory, or visual trials while their brain activity was recorded using EEG. The neurotypical group demonstrated a non-linear audio-visual effect in alpha oscillations, whereas the autistic group showed merely additive processing. Despite these differences in neural correlates, both groups achieved similar behavioral audio-visual facilitation outcomes. These findings suggest that although autistic and neurotypical brains might process multisensory cues differently, they achieve comparable benefits from audio-visual speech. These results contribute to the growing body of literature on MSI atypicalities in autism.