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Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) display differences in multisensory function as quantified by several different measures. This study estimated the stability of variables derived from commonly used measures of multisensory function in school-aged children with ASD. Participants completed: a simultaneity judgment task for audiovisual speech, tasks designed to elicit the McGurk effect, listening-in-noise tasks, electroencephalographic recordings, and eye-tracking tasks. Results indicate the stability of indices derived from tasks tapping multisensory processing is variable. These findings have important implications for measurement in future research. Averaging scores across repeated observations will often be required to obtain acceptably stable estimates and, thus, to increase the likelihood of detecting effects of interest, as it relates to multisensory processing in children with ASD., (©AAIDD.)

Three experiments investigated 4-, 6-, and 8-month-old infants' perception of the audible, visible, and combined attributes of bimodally specified syllables. Ninety-six infants in each experiment were habituated to a person mouthing and uttering a syllable and then tested for detection of changes of either the audible, visible, or combined attributes of the syllable. When the attributes of the syllable were produced in an adult-directed manner, all three age groups discriminated the audible and bimodal attribute changes but only the 8-month-olds discriminated the visible one. When the difference between the familiar and novel attributes of the syllable was enhanced by testing with a novel syllable produced in an infant-directed manner, all three age groups detected all three types of changes. Finally, to test the possible role of audiovisual synchrony in responsiveness, infants were tested with an asynchronous syllable spoken either by the same person or by a novel person following habituation to a synchronous syllable. Results suggested that at four months infants attended primarily to the featural information, at six months primarily to the asynchrony, and at eight months to both features independently. These results help identify some of the important dimensions of multimodal speech during early development.

The present study investigated intersensory interaction between auditory and visual stimulation in newborn infants. Stimulation in 1 modality may influence the response to stimulation in a second modality by changing the infant's state of arousal. To test this possibility, newborns' visual preferences for light patches of different intensity were examined following auditory stimulation. Visual preferences in infants not previously exposed to sound described an inverted U, indicating a preference for the light of intermediate intensity. In contrast, infants who were first exposed to sound preferred the light or lowest intensity. The results indicate that newborns attend to quantitative variations in stimulation and that these variations reflect both the objective stimulus intensity and organismic factors.