Explorations of musical processing in individuals with autism

Thesis

This thesis consists of three studies that explore the musical processing of children with autism. These studies were based on prior research that has argued that those with autism exhibit enhanced processing of musical stimuli. In study 1, 11 children with high functioning autism, matched to 11 control children on chronological age, nonverbal IQ, gender, and musical training and exposure, were tested on tasks assessing melodic memory and disembedding, frequency discrimination, receptive language, and phonological short term memory to compare the children's processing of language and music. The children with autism's language profiles were deficient. Their musical and frequency discrimination performance, however, were similar to that of the typically developing children. Since these findings were unexpected as there was no evidence of enhanced musical performance, study 2 was a replication of the note identification and disembedding task by Heaton (2003) and was carried out with the same group of participants as study 1. Heaton's results were not replicated with the children with autism performing less well than the typically developing controls on the note identification task and as well as controls on the disembedding task. The third study was an exploratory, observational experiment of musical responsiveness in a group of 16 young children with severe autism whose levels of activity, musical gestures, and socialisations were assessed over a condition of silence and music with and without many changes (in dynamics, tempo, key, meter, etc.). Although statistically significant results were not found, the observational paradigm, with high inter-rater reliability, served as a starting point for future investigations with this under-researched population.

Authors: Accordino, R

• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford