Abstract
Compared 8- to 14-year-old children with either autism or receptive developmental language disorder (RDLD) to age- and IQ-matched normal controls in their ability to detect both frequent (p=.70) and infrequent (p=.30) randomly presented auditory stimuli under task and no-task conditions. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs), behavioral reaction times, and target detection accuracy rates were measured. Although the three groups of children performed in a similar manner on behavioral measures, only the children with autism demonstrated an abnormally small amplitude of the P3b, a component of the ERP. This result is interpreted in terms of (a) the consistency of this finding with other ERP studies involving older individuals with autism; and (b) its significance with respect to the difficulty children with autism have in modifying their expectancies to contextually relevant sequences of auditory information.
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Supported by NINCDS grant R01-NS26814-01 awarded to Alan Lincoln. The senior author thanks the San Diego Regional Center and the San Diego Unified School District for their continued assistance and support.
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Lincoln, A.J., Courchesne, E., Harms, L. et al. Contextual probability evaluation in autistic, receptive developmental language disorder, and control children: Event-related brain potential evidence. J Autism Dev Disord 23, 37–58 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01066417
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01066417