Effects of Phonetic Complexity on Tonal Pitch Perception in Mandarin-speaking Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

This study examined the tonal pitch perception under conditions of varying phonetic complexity by 4-7-year-old Mandarin-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing (TD) children using an identification task. Results showed that children with ASD demonstrated superior pitch identification ability compared to TD children under all stimulus conditions. However, as phonetic complexity increased, the pitch identification accuracy in children with ASD decreased due to the influence of semantic processing difficulty. These findings suggest that whether Mandarin-speaking children with ASD exhibit superior pitch perception ability in both speech and non-speech conditions may be regulated by attention mechanisms in experimental tasks. Additionally, the preference for low-level local information processing observed in children with ASD is related to their high-level integrative processing ability, supporting the Weak Central Coherence Hypothesis. The results provide further empirical evidence for clarifying the theoretical contradictions regarding perceptual anomalies in children with ASD.