Schedule of Events | Symposia

To “B” or Not to “B”: Exploring Letter Statistical Learning in the Language Network of Autistic Children

Poster Session E - Monday, March 31, 2025, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Katherine Trice¹ (trice.k@northeastern.edu), Anna Ciriello¹, Brynn Siles¹, Zhenghan Qi¹; ¹Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

Autistic (ASD) children exhibit variable language and reading skills, and research has found an association between spoken-language and statistical learning (SL) (Boucher, 2011; Davidson & Weismer, 2013; Hu et al., 2023; Aslin & Newport, 2014; Erickson & Thiessen, 2015). The connection between syllable and letter SL found in typically-developing (TD) children does not exist in ASD (Hu et al., 2023). In this fMRI study, we ask whether letters and their embedded patterns are processed by the language network in autistic school-aged children. Using a visual-letter SL task, we examined brain activation in language regions while children viewed structured letter (embedded statistical patterns) vs random letter sequences (ASD: N=16, 3 girls, Mage=7.87 years, SDage=0.99. TD: N=22, 12 girls, Mage=8.78 years, SDage=2.04) (Schneider et al., 2020). In TD, LpSTG, LMFG, and LIFG showed sensitivity to letters, regardless of sequence (ps<0.001), but not ASD. No sensitivity to images in either group, regardless of sequence, were seen in these regions. TD demonstrated structured over random letter sequence sensitivity in LIFG and LaSTG (ps<0.05), but not ASD. This wasn’t a case of lateralization effects – none of the right hemisphere language regions or homologues showed sensitivity to letters or letter-sequence contrasts. Unlike TD, letter SL in ASD did not engage language-related regions of the brain, nor did letters regardless of sequence type. This suggests that autistic children may not treat letters in their phonological forms during SL, which could contribute to learning difficulty for letter-embedded patterns that might lead to downstream reading difficulties in autism.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Development & aging