Visual and Linguistic Narrative Processing in Autism Spectrum Disorders. ERP Evidence

Coderre, Cohn, Slipher, Cherneck, Ledoux, and Gordon (2018) investigated the comprehension of linguistic narratives with sentences and visual narrative with comic strips in adult patients with autism spectrum disorders and healthy control participants while recording event-related potentials. The authors were especially interested in the N400 ERP component, which is thought to be involved in language. The authors wanted to assess whether both linguistic as well as visual processing of narratives is impaired in autism spectrum disorders.

Adults with ASD and healthe comparison subjects were compared on this task. The N400 component was studied for this task in order to assess if the comprehension difficulties in ASD are only apparent in the linguistic domain, or also in the visual domain.

Comprehension impairments in patients with ASD were found in both the linguistic and visual domain, which is indicative of a more domain-general deficit. It is suggested that patients with ASD make more use of bottom-up processes for each part of a narrative episode. In the linguistic domain, as well as in the visual domain, patients with ASD exhibited smaller N400 ERP amplitedes as compared to healthy control subjects (Coderre et al., 2018).