Musical Beat Perception Skills of Autistic and Neurotypical Children

Many autistic children show musical interests and good musical skills including pitch and melodic memory. Autistic children may also perceive temporal regularities in music such as the primary beat underlying the rhythmic structure of music given some work showing preserved rhythm processing in the context of basic, nonverbal auditory stimuli. The temporal regularity and prediction of musical beats can potentially serve as an excellent framework for building skills in non-musical areas of growth for autistic children. We examine if autistic children are perceptually sensitive to the primary beat of music by comparing the musical beat perception skills of autistic and neurotypical children. Twenty-three autistic children and 23 neurotypical children aged 6-13 years with no group differences in chronological age and verbal and nonverbal mental ages completed a musical beat perception task where they identified whether beeps superimposed on musical excerpts were on or off the musical beat. Overall task performance was above the theoretical chance threshold of 50% but not the statistical chance threshold of 70% across groups. On-beat (versus off-beat) accuracy was higher for the autistic group but not the neurotypical group. The autistic group was just as accurate at detecting beat alignments (on-beat) but less precise at detecting beat misalignments (off-beat) compared to the neurotypical group. Perceptual sensitivity to beat alignments provides support for spared music processing among autistic children and informs on the accessibility of using musical beats and rhythm for cultivating related skills and behaviours (e.g., language and motor abilities).