Brain-signal pattern linked to communication challenges in autism emerges as a potential marker

Researchers at the University of Virginia have identified a brain-signal pattern that may help explain the variability in communication difficulties among autistic children and teenagers, offering new insights into the neural mechanisms underlying everyday social interactions.

Researchers at the University of Virginia say they have identified a brain-signal pattern that may help explain why some autistic children and teenagers struggle more than others with everyday communication. The work, published in Scientific Reports, was led by neuroscientist Kevin Pelphrey and data scientist Jack Van Horn, with collaborators at Seattle Children’s Research Institute, the University of Washington, Yale and UCLA. It looked at 306 young people aged 7 to 18, including 162 autistic participants and 144 typically developing peers, all of whom listened to nonsense speech while wearing a 128-sensor EEG cap.

Rather than focusing on the familiar peaks and troughs of brainwave rhythms, the team examined the brain’s aperiodic signal, a background pattern that researchers say reflects the balance between excitation and inhibition in neural activity. According to the paper, autistic participants showed a noisier version of that signal, with altered excitation-inhibition measures that the authors linked to a higher level of cortical noise.

That noisier signal was associated with weaker performance on measures of everyday verbal communication, but not with vocabulary or grammar. The distinction matters because it suggests the EEG pattern may capture something different from language knowledge itself, pointing instead to the broader machinery that supports communication in daily life. UVA’s account of the study says the finding could help explain why communication difficulties vary so widely across autistic people.

The researchers stress that the measure is not a diagnostic test. Even so, the study adds to a growing body of work on aperiodic EEG activity in autism. Recent research published in Molecular Autism has also linked resting-state aperiodic and periodic EEG activity in preschool-aged autistic children with language skills, while other autism studies have examined how aperiodic signals change during active tasks or after neurofeedback interventions. Taken together, the studies suggest that this less familiar brain signal may become a useful marker for understanding autism, even if it remains a long way from clinical use.