Review on auditory pitch perception in ASD (Chen et al., 2022)
Creators: name: Chen, Yu
name: Tang, Enze
name: Ding, Hongwei
name: Zhang, Yang
Publisher: name: ASHA journals
Year: 2022
Subjects: Audiology
Audio processing

description: <strong>Purpose:</strong> Pitch plays an important role in auditory perception of music and language. This study provides a systematic review with meta-analysis to investigate whether individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have enhanced pitch processing ability and to identify the potential factors associated with processing differences between ASD and neurotypicals. <strong>Method: </strong>We conducted a systematic search through six major electronic databases focusing on the studies that used nonspeech stimuli to provide a qualitative and quantitative assessment across existing studies on pitch perception in autism. We identified potential participant- and methodology-related moderators and conducted metaregression analyses using mixed-effects models. <strong>Results: </strong>On the basis of 22 studies with a total of 464 participants with ASD, we obtained a small-to-medium positive effect size (<em>g</em> = 0.26) in support of enhanced pitch perception in ASD. Moreover, the mean age and nonverbal IQ of participants were found to significantly moderate the between-studies heterogeneity. <strong>Conclusions: </strong>Our study provides the first meta-analysis on auditory pitch perception in ASD and demonstrates the existence of different developmental trajectories between autistic individuals and neurotypicals. In addition to age, nonverbal ability is found to be a significant contributor to the lower level/local processing bias in ASD. We highlight the need for further investigation of pitch perception in ASD under challenging listening conditions. Future neurophysiological and brain imaging studies with a longitudinal design are also needed to better understand the underlying neural mechanisms of atypical pitch processing in ASD and to help guide auditory-based interventions for improving language and social functioning. <strong>Supplemental Material S1.</strong> PRISMA checklist. <strong>Supplemental Material S2.</strong> Characteristics of studies included in quantitative synthesis. <strong>Supplemental Material S3.</strong> Overall pitch processing performance (accuracy) of ASD participants. <strong>Supplemental Material S4.</strong> Results of leave-one-out sensitivity analysis sorted by heterogeneity (I2). The shaded area with a dashed line in its center represents the estimated pooled effect and its 95% confidence interval of included studies. <strong>Supplemental Material S5.</strong> Forest plot after removing outliers. Forest plot with effect size (Hedges's <em>g</em>) and confidence intervals for included studies after the removal of three outliers. <strong>Supplemental Material S6.</strong> Contour-enhanced meta-analysis funnel plots. <strong>Supplemental Material S7.</strong> Funnel plot. The effect size for each study (Hedges's <em>g</em>) is plotted against the standard error. <strong>Supplemental Material S8. </strong>Results of the meta-regression analyses. Chen, Y., Tang, E., Ding, H., &amp; Zhang, Y. (2022). Auditory pitch perception in autism spectrum disorder: A systematic review and meta-analysis. <em>Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research</em>. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1044/2022_JSLHR-22-00254