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Two hallmarks of speech in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are not responding to, or not being soothed by, human speech, such as a mother's voice, and a lack of usual prosody (intonation and pitch), which can present as a singsong emphasis or a flat, affectless tone. These investigators used resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine neurological bases of ASD speech phenomena — specifically, the connections between voice-selective brain regions and those involved in reward.
Participants were 20 children with ASD (age, 10 years) and 19 age-, sex-, and IQ-matched controls with similar reading and motor abilities. Compared with controls, ASD participants showed underconnectivity between left-hemisphere posterior superior tem…