Voice processing abilities in children with autism, children with specificlanguage impairments, and young typically developing children

It is well established that people with autism have impaired face processin g, but much less is known about voice processing in autism. Four experiment s were therefore carried out to assess (1) familiar voice-face and sound-ob ject matching; (2) familiar voice recognition; (3) unfamiliar voice discrim ination; and (4) vocal affect naming and vocal-facial affect matching. in E xperiments 1 and 2 language-matched children with specific language impairm ent (SLI) were the controls. In Experiments 3 and 4 language-matched childr en with SLI and young mainstream children were the controls. The results we re unexpected: the children with autism were not impaired relative to contr ols on Experiments 1, 2 and 3, and were superior to the children with SLI o n both parts of Experiment 4, although impaired on affect matching relative to the mainstream children. These results are interpreted in terms of an u nexpected impairment of voice processing in the children with SLI associate d partly, but not wholly, with an impairment of cross-modal processing. Per formance on the experimental tasks was not associated with verbal or nonver bal ability in either of the clinical groups. The implications of these fin dings for understanding autism and SLI are discussed.