Predictive processing of music and language in autism: Evidence from Mandarin and English speakers.

Researchers studied how autistic people predict what comes next in music and language compared to non-autistic people. They tested people who speak Mandarin Chinese and English. The results showed that when groups were well-matched for skills and experience, autistic people performed similarly to non-autistic people. This suggests that differences in prediction abilities may be due to individual experiences rather than autism itself.

This cross-cultural study examined predictive processing abilities in music and language among autistic and non-autistic individuals speaking Mandarin and English. Researchers used production tasks (completing unfinished melodies/sentences) and perception tasks (rating expectedness) with matched stimuli. In the Mandarin-speaking sample, autistic participants showed intact musical prediction but atypical linguistic prediction, while group differences disappeared in the more closely matched English-speaking sample. The findings suggest that apparent predictive processing difficulties in autism may be influenced by individual differences in training and vocabulary skills rather than generalized prediction deficits.

Results suggest clinicians should consider individual differences in experience and training when assessing predictive processing abilities. Apparent deficits may reflect environmental factors rather than inherent autism characteristics, supporting individualized rather than deficit-based approaches.

Sample sizes not reported. Study design unclear from abstract. Mandarin sample had imbalanced musical training and vocabulary skills between groups, potentially confounding results. Limited to two language groups.

Atypical predictive processing has been associated with autism across multiple domains, based mainly on artificial antecedents and consequents. As structured sequences where expectations derive from implicit learning of combinatorial principles, language and music provide naturalistic stimuli for investigating predictive processing. In this study, we matched melodic and sentence stimuli in cloze probabilities and examined musical and linguistic prediction in Mandarin- (Experiment 1) and English-speaking (Experiment 2) autistic and non-autistic individuals using both production and perception tasks. In the production tasks, participants listened to unfinished melodies/sentences and then produced the final notes/words to complete these items.

In the perception tasks, participants provided expectedness ratings of the completed melodies/sentences based on the most frequent notes/words in the norms. While Experiment 1 showed intact musical prediction but atypical linguistic prediction in autism in the Mandarin sample that demonstrated imbalanced musical training experience and receptive vocabulary skills between groups, the group difference disappeared in a more closely matched sample of English speakers in Experiment 2. These findings suggest the importance of taking an individual differences approach when investigating predictive processing in music and language in autism, as the difficulty in prediction in autism may not be due to generalized problems with prediction in any type of complex sequence processing.