Behavioral and Neurophysiological Evidence of Speech Processing in Chinese-Speaking Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Review and Future Directions

Abstract

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that presents with core deficits in language and social communication areas. Past decades have witnessed a growing number of studies concerning this population’s language and communication skills. However, studies focusing on Chinese-speaking individuals with ASD are rare and have just begun to accumulate. This review focuses on prosody and lexical tone perception and production in Chinese-speaking individuals with ASD. We also briefly review the evidence from general ASD literature for cross-language comparisons. Similar to patterns seen in many non-tonal language speakers with ASD, Chinese-speaking individuals with ASD generally demonstrate atypical pitch in terms of both average and range of values in verbal productions. Behavioral and neurophysiological evidence suggest atypicality, such as enhanced lower-level auditory processing and reduced higher-level linguistic processing in Chinese-speaking individuals with ASD. We also report some preliminary neural intervention data on bilingual English–Mandarin-learning children with ASD. Future directions on advancing theory and practice are discussed.