Poster A39, Tuesday, August 20, 2019, 10:15 am – 12:00 pm, Restaurant Hall
Visual and verbal narrative comprehension in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders: an ERP study
Mirella Manfredi1, Neil Cohn2, Pemella Sanchez Pinho3, Elizabeth Fernandez3, Paulo Sergio Boggio3;1Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, 2Department of Communication and Cognition, Tilburg University, 3Social and Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Center for Biological Science and Health, Mackenzie Presbyterian University, São Paulo
It has long been claimed that children with autism face deficits in comprehending verbal materials, while comprehension of visual materials remain intact. However, verbal materials often are presented with sequencing (sentences, narratives), while visual materials use a single image. What if visual materials were also sequential, like in the visual narratives found in comics? We thus examined semantic processing during the presentation of both spoken sentences and visual narratives for children with ASD compared to typically developing children. In addition, this work sought to observe the ERPs evoked by visual narratives in children at all, given that no apparent prior studies have yet examined the neurocognitive processing of such ubiquitous materials. We presented auditory sentences with congruent or incongruent final words (a common noun), and separately, we presented 3-panel long visual narratives with congruent or incongruent final panels. The experimental group involved twenty-four ASD school-aged children (mean age = 12.6) and sixteen age-matched TD children (mean age = 11.4). In the auditory sentences, we observed a focal central N400 effect to incongruent words as compared to congruent ones, which was slightly attenuated for the children with ASD compared to the TD children. Following the N400, a sustained negativity was larger to incongruous than congruous words, but only for the TD children, possibly reflecting a cost of further processing the inconsistent auditory information that was absent for children with ASD. Critical panels in visual narratives evoked a greater N400 amplitude to incongruent than congruent panels with a fronto-central scalp distribution. No differences were observed between the N400 effect in ASD and control group. However, as in sentences, a fronto-central negativity maintained after the N400 to incongruent critical panels, reflecting sustained processing from the preceding N400. In addition, incongruent panels evoked a centro-parietal late positivity (a P600/LPP), but only for the TD children. This late response could indicate updating processes evoked only by neurotypical children, suggesting that ASD children may not have been as sensitive to integrating the discontinuities of the incoming visual information. Overall, our results seem to suggest that ASD children differ more from TD children in the later time windows (550-750ms) than in the early stages of processing across both verbal (late negativity) and visual (P600/LPP) modalities. This suggests that later “interpretive” or “updating” processing may be slower for ASD children in the processing of meaning. These findings suggest that ASD children face processing deficits in both verbal and visual materials when integrating meaning across sequential units, though such impairments may arise in different parts of the interpretive process, depending on the modality.
Themes: Meaning: Lexical Semantics, Disorders: Developmental
Method: Electrophysiology (MEG/EEG/ECOG)