Growing Up ‘In Sync’: Connecting a Bridge to an Autistic Mind’s World

This study investigates the benefits of using an innovative digital system to screen for auditory-visual integration deficits by determining the temporal integration windows of bimodal speech perception in autistic and typically developing children, and to evaluate whether speech intelligibility and prosodic pro-cessing can be improved through audio-video noise reduction in two dimensional (2D) and stereoscopic three dimensional (S3D) display environments. Eleven high-functioning autistic children and eleven age-matched controls (age range: 12-14 years) completed auditory-visual integration tasks incorporat-ed in two innovatively developed software programs presented in 2D and S3D, testing: 1) onset synchrony/asynchrony detec-tion of conversational speech associated with signal lead rec-ognition and 2) speech intelligibility and prosodic processing of unimodal and bimodal emotional and non-emotional stimul