Autistic People Could Have Specific Vocal Imitative Deficits: Study

Autistic adults have a variety of deficits in imitation skills. According to a new study, autism is also linked to specific vocal imitative deficits.

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder could have a vocal imitative deficit that is specific to absolute pitch and duration matching, say researchers.

According to the CDC reports, approximately 1 in 54 children in the United States is diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), as per 2016 data. Imitations in Individuals with autism spectrum disorder have deficits in imitation skills for various tasks, including action imitation, facial imitation, and vocal imitation.

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‘Autistic adults can imitate sung pitch more accurately than spoken pitch. Treatments for autism must focus on these forms of imitation deficits to foster musical interactions among people with this disorder.’

While previous research suggested that people with ASD tend to have atypical imitation deficits as they cannot reproduce the end goal of other’s actions in the exact form in which the action is carried out, in a recent study, researchers from the University of Buffalo investigated imitation of speech and song in English-speaking individuals with and without ASD and its modulation by age.

“This project shows that some of the conclusions we may want to draw about autism from other tasks may not be as widely generalizable as we think,” says Peter Pfordresher, a co-author of the study.

The study revealed that sung pitch was imitated more accurately than spoken pitch by adults with ASD. Further, children with ASD imitated spoken pitch more accurately than adults when it came to speech stimuli.

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“Clinicians working with autistic individuals may want to focus on these forms of imitation to help those with ASD foster musical interactions that could facilitate their ability to bond with others and to form relationships,” emphasizes Pfordresher.

The findings of the study were published in the journal Autism Research .

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