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Abstract Neurological and behavioral findings indicate that atypical auditory processing characterizes autism. The present study tested the hypothesis that auditory processing is less domain‐specific in autism than in typical development. Participants with autism and controls completed a pitch sequence discrimination task in which same/different judgments of music and/or speech stimulus pairs were made. A signal detection analysis showed no difference in pitch sensitivity across conditions in the autism group, while controls exhibited significantly poorer performance in conditions incorporating speech. The results are largely consistent with perceptual theories of autism, which propose that a processing bias towards featural/low‐level information characterizes the disorder, as well as supporting the notion that such individuals exhibit selective attention to a limited number of simultaneously presented cues.

Abstract Theories of autism have proposed that a bias towards low‐level perceptual information, or a featural/surface‐biased information‐processing style, may compromise higher‐level language processing in such individuals. Two experiments, utilizing linguistic stimuli with competing low‐level/perceptual and high‐level/semantic information, tested processing biases in children with autism and matched controls. Whereas children with autism exhibited superior perceptual processing of speech relative to controls, and showed no evidence of either a perceptual or semantic processing bias, controls showed a tendency to process speech semantically. The data provide partial support to the perceptual theories of autism. It is additionally proposed that the pattern of results may reflect different patterns of attentional focusing towards single or multiple stimulus cues in speech between children with autism and controls.