Abstract: Speech and song may be represented differently within a listener, but it is unclear whether these representations are consistent across listeners. We reason that differences in listeners’ perceptual ability in acoustic cues relevant to speech and song (e.g., pitch and duration) may have a cascading effect on their underlying mental representations. We investigated this using an auditory reverse correlation paradigm with listeners with and without autism (ASD), given findings of atypical pitch processing among ASD individuals. Five ASD adults and age-, gender-, and IQ-matched controls were presented with 200 pairs of a four-word phrase with each word having randomly manipulated pitch and duration. They decided which was more speech-/song-like in separate experimental blocks. To analyse the representations’ pitch contour, we obtained the best fitting model for each block by group to estimate its overall shape and compared two model parameters (y-intercept (b0) and slope at midpoint). Globally, the ASD group represented speech and song with a cubic shape whereas the control group represented both linearly (though in a larger non-matched sample, the control group had cubic pitch contours for both speech and song). The ASD group had a higher b0 for song and a more positive slope for speech than the control group. In contrast to pitch, there were no group differences observed for duration. Our preliminary findings therefore indicate that ASD listeners may represent pitch contours, but not durational patterns, of speech and song differently than neurotypical listeners, which may stem from group differences in pitch processing. ---------- Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86128899765?pwd=MG1Xc3d0cGQrSjZIR0t2SXd3c3E4Zz09 Meeting ID: 861 2889 9765 <br> Password: 7D997N