#Impact of Autism on Music and Language Processing ## Music and Autism Autism occurs along a continuum of impairments. Specifically, autism occurs with three kinds of impairments common to autistic individuals: socialization, communication, and imagination. Common characteristics of autistic individuals include limited interests, a preoccupation with parts of objects, desire for a structured environment, excellent rote memory, sensitivity and attention to music. Occasionally, certain autistic individuals manifest specific savant abilities with music, memory, or numbers, for example. Prevalent cognitive models, such as Weak Central Coherence (WCC) and Enhanced Perceptual Processing (EPF), of autism suggest that autism is the result of a processing bias towards details and non-global information and that basic perceptual processes are enhanced (Mattron, Dawson, Soulieres, Hubert, Burack, 2006). In short, WCC claims that these features are the result of a global processing deficit whereas EPF claims that they are the result of an enhancement of low-level perceptual function s. There are a limited number of research articles dealing specifically with music and Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Nonetheless, much of the research that has been conducted follows some interesting lines of inquiry. Tony Wigram and Christian Gold (2006 and 2008) conducted studies of music therapy on behavior of autistic individuals. Pamela Heaton has pursued inquiry into the perception of music in autistic individuals. A practical study by Petra Kern, Mark Wolery, and David Aldridge (2006) analyzed the impact on behavior of converting verbal greetings into song form. Historically, autism has been associated with musical orientation and skills (Heaton, 2005). Considering the difficulty that individuals with ASD have in developing communication skills (Wigram and Gold, 2006), it makes sense to leverage any advantages or normally intact functions that autistic individuals may have in non-communication domains towards further developing communication skills. Notably, music therapy has been used to succ essfully introduce new behaviors to autistic children. Wigram and Gold (2006) published a review article discussing the role of music therapy in treating individuals with ASD. While they emphasized the potential of music in treating problems with verbal language and non-verbal communication skills in autistic children, they discovered, at that time, that much of the current research on treating ASD with music therapy was not conducive to drawing further conclusions and that most previous research was still in an extremely early stage. It was not until 2006 that a truly systematic and consistent review of music therapy literature involving children with autism was completed. Wigram and Gold discussed two studies, which showed significant effects of interventions involving music compared with non-music treatments. One study covered an intervention technique that improved the ability of autistic children to imitate signs and words while the other studied an intervention technique designed to impact specific repetitive behaviors. However, they noted that the b oth of these techniques had limited clinical applications due to the facts that the treatments were highly structured, specific to one behavior, and were passive forms of music therapy. According to Wigram and Gold, “music therapy in clinical practice … frequently involves active techniques including improvisation.” It is important to note that music therapy still showed significant potential as a treatment for behavioral issues related to autism. Kim, Wigram, and Gold (2008) worked together to investigate the use of improvisational music therapy to leverage the musical interest of autistic children during behavior therapy. According to their research article, problems in developing joint attention skills lead to the social problems in children with autism. Researchers cited in their article had noted that improvisational music making allowed for expressivity among autistic children. They discovered that the use of improvisational music therapy was better at developing non-verbal communication skills and assisting in performance of social tasks than toy playing sessions. Their results showed that improvisational music therapy measurably increased the participants eye contact and turn taking during the sessions. Part of the reasoning for the efficacy of this style of music therapy centers around the creation of a recognition within the autistic child that the music has a relation to his or her self. Once this recognition has been made by the ch ild, the therapist can begin to interact with the child through the shared creation of music and bring the child’s attention towards the joint nature of the experience, which is predicted to increase the child’s ability to maintain joint attention. Each of these three studies led to questions about why individuals with ASD are inclined towards an interest in music. Current research shows that one in five individuals with ASD have enhanced frequency detection and that their behavioral responses to auditory stimuli are modulated by their sensitivity to auditory perception (Jones, Happé, Baird, et al. 2009). Perhaps the increased interest in music stems directly from this enhanced ability for frequency discrimination, which causes music to stand out for them in cognitive processes. Other possibilities include that reward mechanisms respond to music with a greater magnitude than normal or that music provokes a greater emotional response than other emotional stimuli, for these individuals. In any case, there has been some interesting research by Pamela Heaton into the precise nature of the enhancement of musical perception in individuals with ASD. In a 2005 study, she was interested in testing the abilities of autistic individuals to process intervals and contour. She replicated the results of earlier studies that showed autistic individuals to possess enhanced pitch processing, although her study analyzed this result more closely utilizing a modified experimental design and was able to rule out the hypothesis that long-term memory was being used more efficiently for auditory stimuli. Instead, she notes that there are different neural mechanisms involved in perceiving pitch patterns or pitch interval distance. Participants in the study were only able to exceed the performance of control groups at detecting small interval changes but performed no better than control at detecting changes in contour. This finding, in her opinion, support cognitive models of autism that include enhanced proce ssing of auditory perceptions. ## Language and Autism Autistic individuals are usually characterized as having difficulties with communication and language compared to typically developing (TD) individuals. For this reason, it seems reasonable to assert that a relationship exists between autism, especially autism with language impairment (ASD-LI), and selective language impairments (SLI). In fact, a historical hypothesis as to the cause of autism claimed that social withdrawal and rigid behavior, characteristic of autism, was due to a severe developmental language disorder (Williams et al. 2008). If there is a close relationship between ASD-LI and SLI then effective treatments for one could be applied to the other. At the same time, preventative techniques could be developed for a larger group of affected individuals. Unfortunately, evidence suggests that any relationship between autism and SLI is mostly superficial with limited overlap between the two disorders. Researchers Riches, Loucas, Baird, Charman, and Simonoff conducted a 2010 study in which they compared the linguistic capacity of autistic individuals with language impairment to individuals with SLI. Their experimental method involved a Sentence Repetition task designed by researchers Slobin, Welsh, and Clay in the late 60’s through the early 70’s. The test, in its most general form, involves presenting sentences to an individual and recall by the individual is measured. Riches points out that while there is “uncertainty over cognitive processes involved in Sentence Repetition … variation in error patterns across different populations suggests that Sentence Repetition data can elucidate underlying language difficulties.” Particularly, sentence repetition is sensitive to semantic and syntactical processes (Riches et al. 2010). The task originated as a method to demonstrate the idea that sequences of words are stored in syntactical chunks, anchored to long-term memory, when the sequence length e xtends beyond the capacity of short-term memory. An interesting feature within the complex cognitive mechanism of Sentence Repetition is that semantic comprehension can become a limiting factor for performance in the task. Since chunking is facilitated by syntax, it is expected that some comprehension of the sentences is required for the normal functioning of the process. Riches et al. used sentence repetition to observe the impact of ASD-LI and SLI upon cognitive processing of complex syntax. Their study compared these two separate groups to a control group of TD individuals. Interestingly, the authors found that both experimental groups presented more errors with increasing syntactic complexity or increasing distance between grammatical relations. This would suggest that ASD-LI and SLI do share similar linguistic profiles, however, statistical analysis showed that the SLI group presented a significant difference in profile. Particularly, the SLI group made more errors in response to syntactic complexity and were more likely to completely change the sentence structure during repetition. This suggests that the cognitive mechanisms being affected by the two disorders may also differ. Riches et al. discussed previous research that had removed differences in attention as a candidate and so they propose that short-term memory impairment may be the cause for increased errors by the SLI group relative to the ASD-LI group. An earlier exploration of the linguistic similarities and differences between ASD-LI and SLI was performed by David Williams, Nicola Botting, and Jill Boucher in 2008. They conducted systematic review of behavioral, neurobiological, and genetic data comparing these two groups and reached a similar conclusion to that of Riches et al. – that language impairment in ASD is dissimilar to that of SLI. The authors analyzed several results that are worth mentioning here. First, a series of behavioral studies by Bartak during the 1970s showed that ASD-LI and SLI could be differentiated solely in terms of differences in their linguistic profiles. Specifically, children with autism and language impairment were less able to process gestural communication and had worse comprehension of spoken and written language than children with SLI. Additionally, children with ASD-LI were less likely to have problems articulating and produced more inappropriate utterances than children with SLI (Williams et al. 2008). A team of researchers led by Mawhood followed up with most of the participants in Bartak’s studies after they had reached adulthood. They discovered that both groups could still be differentiated (to a lesser degree) by their linguistic profiles; however, they also found some interesting overlaps in their adult profiles. The ASD-LI group still had significantly worse social function and communication ability but a little over a quarter of the SLI group had developed impairments in relationships and communication as well as a narrow range of interests and in a some cases even stereotyped behaviors (Williams et al. 2008) all of which are typical characteristics of ASD. While it might be tempting to posit a link between ASD and the effect of SLI over time, Williams points out that the individuals in the SLI group that had these characteristics expressed them in a manner opposite to that of the ASD-LI group. The SLI group had problems with expression, but not reception, whereas the ASD-LI group had problem s with reception rather than expression. This is a distinguishing trait of ASD-LI compared to SLI – impairment of expression occurs more often in SLI than in ASD-LI (Williams et al. 2008). This line of inquiry suggests that while ASD-LI and SLI may share some of the same behavioral markers, ultimately, there might be completely different etiologies and bases in neurobiology. While a genetic approach is beyond the scope of this paper, later in the review article, Williams notes at least one heritable aspect of SLI that is not a part of the ASD-LI phenotype. Ultimately, the Williams et al. suggest that instead of taking the approach described at the outset of this section – to find overlapping treatments for both conditions – it would be wiser to focus research on the central impairments of the two conditions, individually. In this vein, Rundblad and Annaz studied a social aspect to language – metaphor and metonymy – with which autistic individuals have a difficult time using. Metaphor is the use of a word or expression as a non-literal referent to something else (“life is a highway”) whereas metonymy is the use of the name of a feature or part of something as the name for the thing itself (“they counted heads”). Rundblad and Annaz describe metaphor as building on similarity while metonymy builds on contiguity. They also describe a characterization of these two phenomena by Lakoff – “metaphor is a mapping across two conceptual domains whilst metonymy is a mapping within a single conceptual domain.” This description implies that metapho r is more complex than metonymy, which is supported by data cited in the article “TD understanding of metonymy exceeds metaphor comprehension at all points in time throughout childhood to adulthood … and that metonymy comprehension develops at a faster rate” (Rundblad & Annaz 2010). In addition, while introducing background to their research, the authors presented a previous study by Norbury that suggests semantic knowledge as a predictor of metaphor comprehension. Rundblad and Annaz observed the performance of autistic individuals compared to TD individuals on tests of metaphor and metonymy comprehension against both chronological age and mental age and concluded that autistic individuals have impairment in metaphor comprehension and a delay in metonymy comprehension. They also showed that receptive vocabulary ability was a “reliable predictor of metonymy in the autism group” (Rundblad & Annaz 2010). This data may fit into the Collins and Loftus, Spreading Activation Model (SAM), if we consider that metaphor makes use of words that typically do not have a natural association between each other while metonymy makes use of words that are contiguous in nature. The SAM would predict that since metaphor makes use of words with weak associations, processing metaphor would take longer and be more prone to error and incomprehension. In addition, within this framework, there is a possibility that impairment of comprehension in ASD-LI and the impairment of metaphor comprehension in ASD could be linked by an underlying dysfunction of lexical network formation that is absent in SLI. A mechanical impairment of priming of spreading activations could be a hypothetical reason. In any case, we must also consider the fact that expressive ability is not selectively impaired in ASD-LI (Williams et al. 2008). This may mean that individuals with ASD adapt their cognitive strategies to incorporate an intact or less impaire d expressive ability with an impaired ability to access their lexical network. It is possible that such an adaptation recruits other sub-networks of the brain to produce a functional replica. 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