The challenges of coordinating sounds and images in autistic children
- heloiseherve
- Apr 2
- 1 min read
A study, published in the Journal of Neurodevelopmental Disorders, in February 18th, 2025, found that autistic children have more difficulties processing speech sounds than typically developed children whereas visual motion processing remained intact.
Members of the NeuroSpeech team investigated the way autistic children process visual and auditory information. To do so, they used EEG and an eye-tracker to measure the brain activity and the visual motion while the children were watching cartoons.
For this study, the researchers integrated audio and visual elements. This strategy enabled them to demonstrate an atypical temporal organization in autistic children. In typically developed children, visual
cues help to better understand speech whereas in autistic children, this disrupts comprehension.
Autistic children receive auditory cues before visual cues, creating a misalignment between what they hear and what they see.
These results suggest that early speech anomalies in autistic children not only come from auditory deficits, but from impaired audio-visual dynamic temporal coordination, which likely complicated language acquisition.
The study provides new neural evidence linking multisensory integration failures to central communication symptoms in autism. It suggests that interventions targeting synchronization mechanisms could be beneficial.
Wang, X., Bouton, S., Kojovic, N., Giraud, A.-L., & Schaer, M. (2025). Atypical audio-visual neural synchrony and speech processing in early autism. Journal of Neurodevelopmental Disorders, 17(1), 9. https://doi.org/10.1186/s11689-025-09593-w
