Julia R. Irwin, Senior Scientist au Haskins Laboratories à New Haven, donnera une conférence intitulée "Audiovisual speech perception in children with autism spectrum disorders " le vendredi 9 avril à partir de 15h dans la salle DS-1950 (Métro Berri-UQAM, pavillon De Sève)
The conference will be held in English.
Abstract : My research uses eye-tracking methodology to assess audiovisual (AV) speech perception in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Given the characteristic reduction in gaze to the faces of others in children with ASD, we hypothesized that they would show reduced influence of visual information on heard speech. Responses from a group of children with ASD and a group with typical development (TD) were compared on a set of auditory, visual and audiovisual speech perception tasks. Even when fixated on the face of the speaker, children with ASD were less visually influenced than TD controls. This indicates that there are fundamental differences in the processing of AV speech in children with ASD, which may contribute to the language and communication impairments in this population.