Aberrant Language Reward Circuitry in High-Functioning Autism

Barbara Geller, MD

Children show underconnectivity between voice-selective brain regions and those involved in the rewarding properties of language.

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 temporal sulcus (pSTS) and areas of the dopamine reward pathway (ventral tegmental area, nucleus accumbens, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex; and left-hemisphere insula and orbitofrontal cortex). Lower connectivity was also found between right pSTS (which processes prosody) and areas associated with emotional associative learning (e.g., left orbitofrontal cortex and right amygdala). Lower connectivity between pSTS and reward pathways predicted worse communicative symptoms.

Citation(s):

Abrams DA et al. Underconnectivity between voice-selective cortex and reward circuitry in children with autism. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2013 Jun 17; [e-pub ahead of print].