Predictive processing of music and language in autism: evidence from Mandarin and English speakers

Zhao, C., Ong, J. H. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1503-8311, Veic, A., Patel, A. D., Jiang, C., Fogel, A. R., Wang, L., Hou, Q., Das, D., Crasto, C., Chakrabarti, B. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6649-7895, Williams, T. I., Loutrari, A. and Liu, F. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7776-0222 (2024) Predictive processing of music and language in autism: evidence from Mandarin and English speakers. Autism Research, 17 (6). pp. 1230-1257. ISSN 1939-3792 doi: 10.1002/aur.3133

Abstract/Summary

Atypical predictive processing has been associated with autism across multiple domains, based mainly on artificial antecedents and consequents. As structured sequences where expectations derive from implicit learning of combinatorial principles, language and music provide naturalistic stimuli for investigating predictive processing. In this study, we matched melodic and sentence stimuli in cloze probabilities and examined musical and linguistic prediction in Mandarin- (Experiment 1) and English-speaking (Experiment 2) autistic and non-autistic individuals using both production and perception tasks. In the production tasks, participants listened to unfinished melodies/sentences and then produced the final notes/words to complete these items. In the perception tasks, participants provided expectedness ratings of the completed melodies/sentences based on the most frequent notes/words in the norms. While Experiment 1 showed intact musical prediction but atypical linguistic prediction in autism in the Mandarin sample that demonstrated imbalanced musical training experience and receptive vocabulary skills between groups, the group difference disappeared in a more closely matched sample of English speakers in Experiment 2. These findings suggest the importance of taking an individual differences approach when investigating predictive processing in music and language in autism, as the difficulty in prediction in autism may not be due to generalised problems with prediction in any type of complex sequence processing.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-pure-test.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/115919
Identification Number/DOI	10.1002/aur.3133
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Central Services Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Department of Psychology
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