Autistic Children Show Reduced Activity in Left Superior Temporal Cortex in Response to Social-emotional Meaning in Language

Background: Autistic children often exhibit challenges in social interaction, emotional processing, and language communication. While differences among autistic children in processing non-linguistic social-emotional cues compared to non-autistic pears are well-documented, the neural mechanisms underlying the processing of social-emotional meaning conveyed through the language content remain unclear. In non-autistic adults, the left superior temporal gyrus (STG) and superior temporal sulcus (STS) are sensitive to social-emotional semantics. We investigated whether this neural sensitivity is altered in autistic children. Methods: We recruited 78 children (54 autistic and 24 non-autistic; 68 males, 10 females; mean age 10 years) who underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while listening to sentences describing either people in emotional situations (social-emotional sentences) or sentences describing non-human objects, events, or concepts (object sentences). Results: Significant activity was found in the left STG and STS in response to social-emotional sentences across both groups, but the activity was reduced in autistic children compared to non-autistic controls. No significant group difference was found during general auditory or object-sentence processing. The neural activity in the left STG and STS during social-emotional sentence processing was significantly predicted by the degree of autistic social-affective characteristics but was not predicted by general linguistic ability. Conclusions: Autistic children show reduced activity in the left STG and STS compared to non-autistic peers during social-emotional sentence processing. This reduced activity, driven by social-affective characteristics rather than general linguistic ability, may contribute to autistic children's social communication challenges.