Face recognition and lip-reading in autism

Abstract Autistic children individually matched for mental age with normal subjects were tested on memory for unfamiliar faces and on lip reading ability. The results show that autistic children are poorer than controls in memory for faces but comparable to controls in lip-reading. Autistic children show little influence on their auditory speech perception from visual speech. The results are discussed in relation to Bruce and Young's (1986) model of face recognition. The independence between facial speech and memory for faces is in accordance with this model but is only observed in autistic subjects.