Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is associated with widespread receptive language impairments, yet the neural mechanisms underlying these deficits are poorly understood. Neuroimaging has shown that processing of socially-relevant sounds, including speech and non-speech, is atypical in ASD. However, it is unclear how the presence of lexical-semantic meaning affects speech processing in ASD. Here, we recorded magnetoencephalography data from individuals with ASD (N = 22, ages 7–17, 4 females) and typically developing (TD) peers (N = 30, ages 7–17, 5 females) during unattended listening to meaningful auditory speech sentences and meaningless jabberwocky sentences. After adjusting for age, ASD individuals showed stronger responses to meaningless jabberwocky sentences than to meaningful speech sentences in the same left temporal and parietal language regions where TD individuals exhibited stronger responses to meaningful speech. Maturational trajectories of meaningful speech responses were atypical in temporal, but not parietal, regions in ASD. Temporal responses were associated with ASD severity, while parietal responses were associated with aberrant involuntary attentional shifting in ASD. Our findings suggest a receptive speech processing dysfunction in ASD, wherein unattended meaningful speech elicits abnormal engagement of the language system, while unattended meaningless speech, filtered out in TD individuals, engages the language system through involuntary attention capture.

自闭症谱系障碍 (ASD) 与广泛的接受性语言障碍有关，但对这些缺陷背后的神经机制知之甚少。神经影像学表明，对社交相关声音（包括语音和非语音）的处理在 ASD 中是非典型的。然而，尚不清楚词汇语义意义的存在如何影响 ASD 中的语音处理。在这里，我们记录了自闭症谱系障碍个体（N = 22，7-17 岁，4 名女性）和典型发育 (TD) 同龄人（N = 30，7-17 岁，5 名女性）在无人看管的情况下聆听有意义的听觉言语时的脑磁图数据句子和无意义的 jabberwocky 句子。调整年龄后，在相同的左侧颞叶和顶叶语言区域中，ASD 个体对无意义的 jabberwocky 句子的反应比对有意义的语音句子的反应更强，而 TD 个体对有意义的言语反应更强。有意义的语音反应的成熟轨迹在 ASD 的颞叶区域是非典型的，但不是顶叶区域。时间反应与 ASD 严重程度相关，而顶叶反应与 ASD 中异常的非自愿注意力转移相关。我们的研究结果表明 ASD 中存在接受性语音处理功能障碍，其中无人看管的有意义的语音会引起语言系统的异常参与，而在 TD 个体中过滤掉的无人看管的无意义语音会通过非自愿的注意力捕获来参与语言系统。