Familiar Face and Voice Matching and Recognition in Children with Autism

Relatively able children with autism were compared with age- and language-matched controls on assessments of (1) familiar voice-face identity matching, (2) familiar face recognition, and (3) familiar voice recognition. The faces and voices of individuals at the children's schools were used as stimuli. The experimental group were impaired relative to the controls on all three tasks. Face recognition and voice recognition correlated significantly with voice-face identity matching, but not with each other, suggesting that the recognition impairments jointly cause the matching impairment. Neither chronological age nor verbal mental age were consistently related to the recognition and matching impairments.