Autistic children have trouble identifying familiar words

A recent research has found that young children with autism have a difficult time recognizing ordinary words and more of their brains are occupied with this kind of task compared to typically developing youngsters.

Washington, May 5 : A recent research has found that young children with autism have a difficult time recognizing ordinary words and more of their brains are occupied with this kind of task compared to typically developing youngsters.

The study, conducted by the University of Washington's Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, is part of an attempt to comprehend why language disorders are a trait of children with autism.

"Rather than becoming an expert in recognizing words, their brains slow down," said Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the University of Washington's Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences and an expert in how babies acquire language. "Because these children can't distinguish what should be a familiar word their brains work too hard and they are unable to focus on new words. When they can't understand a word, they miss everything else that follows in a sentence."

Kuhl will present findings that compare 19-to 30-month-old normally developing and autistic children during a keynote address on May 4th at the Sixth International Meeting for Autism Research in Seattle.

Kuhl and her colleagues placed caps fitted with 20 sensors on the heads of the children and recorded brain waves that "leaked through their scalp" while the babies listened to common (ball, dog, cat, book) and uncommon (verb, pint, bide, rate) words.

The children were also exposed to familiar words that were recorded and played backwards. Backwards words generate sound patterns that are not typical of any language.

The brains of normally developing infants responded with a distinctive pattern of activation for each of these types of words. The responses for known and unknown words were noticeably diverse.

According to Kuhl, with the backward words, the children's brains reacted as if they were hearing something entirely different from the other types of words and gave a different signal. In addition, brain activity was fixed in the temporal lobes of both hemispheres of the brain for each word type.

On the contrary, the children with autism showed no difference in their responses between known and unknown words, indicating they couldn't distinguish between them.

However, their brains did respond to the backwards words, and the pattern of activity was fairly similar to that of the normally developing children. Overall brain activity in the children with autism was more disperse and not fixed in the temporal lobes, signifying that more of their brains were tied up trying to understand the words.

Kuhl believes that these studies hold some good news for parents because there are signals that some autistic children are achieving some learning.

"One of the puzzles of autism is the variability of children with it," she said. "We believe the highest functioning autistic children have some recognition of phonemes (the basic sounds of a language). And this new study shows autistic toddlers can differentiate between backward words, which are not characteristic of a language, and real words. So some learning has gone on." "To crack the speech code children must be able to distinguish phonemes, understand known words and be able to decode the word order of a sentence in English or their native language."

Kuhl said researchers require better measures and tools such as magnetoencephalography, which is a non-invasive technology, to analyse and look inside the brains of children with autism.

"We'd like to know what kind of knowledge these children may have locked up in their brains. Children at the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum may have quite a bit. The first possible use of this research would be as a predictor of which children with autism might be responsive to treatment. With these tools we may be able to identify a part of the brain that is not responding, and that may suggest treatments by developing more targeted interventions."

ANI