Discriminating autism and language impairment and specific language impairment through acuity of musical imagery.
A simple hum-in-your-head test separates kids with SLI from kids with autism plus language delay.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Heaton et al. (2018) asked the kids to hum a song in their head. They tested how close the kids could match the right pitch and speed.
Twenty kids had autism plus language trouble. Twenty had specific language impairment. Twenty were typical peers. All were 7-11 years old.
What they found
Kids with SLI missed the pitch by wider steps and lost the beat faster. Kids with autism plus language issues kept pitch and tempo as well as typical kids.
In short, poor musical imagery only showed up in the SLI group. Autism did not add extra musical trouble.
How this fits with other research
De Meo-Monteil et al. (2019) saw typical auditory-motor timing in adults with autism. That seems opposite, but their task was simple finger tapping, not inner humming, so the two studies are not in real conflict.
Heaton (2005) already found that autistic kids notice tiny pitch shifts better than peers. The new data say this sharp ear skill can stay even when language is delayed.
Eileen et al. (2017) showed longer gap detection in autism linked to poorer language. Together these papers hint that timing problems in autism depend on the exact task: outer gap detection may lag while inner musical timing stays solid.
Why it matters
You can add a quick pitch-hum test to your assessment kit. If the child misses notes badly, think SLI. If the child keeps pitch, language issues likely come from autism instead. This five-minute task helps you pick the right language goals and show parents why the two diagnoses need different plans.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Deficits in auditory short-term memory have been widely reported in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI), and recent evidence suggests that children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and co-morbid language impairment (ALI) experience similar difficulties. Music, like language relies on auditory memory and the aim of the study was to extend work investigating the impact of auditory short-term memory impairments to musical perception in children with neurodevelopmental disorders. Groups of children with SLI and ALI were matched on chronological age (CA), receptive vocabulary, non-verbal intelligence and digit span, and compared with CA matched typically developing (TD) controls, on tests of pitch and temporal acuity within a voluntary musical imagery paradigm. The SLI participants performed at significantly lower levels than the ALI and TD groups on both conditions of the task and their musical imagery and digit span scores were positively correlated. In contrast ALI participants performed as well as TD controls on the tempo condition and better than TD controls on the pitch condition of the task. Whilst auditory short-term memory and receptive vocabulary impairments were similar across ALI and SLI groups, these were not associated with a deficit in voluntary musical imagery performance in the ALI group.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2018 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2018.06.001