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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Sep 5, 2025

Testing Sensory and Multisensory Function in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Testing Sensory and Multisensory Function in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Published on: April 22, 2015

Auditory perceptual learning in autistic adults.

Samra Alispahic¹, Elizabeth Pellicano^2,3, Anne Cutler^1,4,5

¹The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

Autism Research : Official Journal of the International Society for Autism Research

|July 5, 2022

Summary

Autistic adults can discern speech sounds but do not automatically adapt phoneme categories to new talkers like neurotypical adults. This perceptual learning difference impacts speech processing theories for autism.

Keywords:

auditory processing autism language development perceptual flexibility perceptual learning phonetic adaptation speech perception

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Published on: December 14, 2012

Area of Science:

Psycholinguistics
Neurodevelopmental Disorders
Auditory Perception

Background:

Auditory perceptual learning, or automatic phoneme category retuning, is well-documented in neurotypical adults and children.
This adaptive speech processing mechanism has not been studied in autistic populations, who often exhibit atypicalities in perceptual, social, and language processing.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate auditory perceptual learning effects in autistic and non-autistic adults using a lexically-guided perceptual learning paradigm.
To determine if autistic adults exhibit automatic attunement to novel talker's speech patterns.

Main Methods:

Utilized a classic lexically-guided perceptual learning paradigm.
Compared perceptual learning and phoneme categorization abilities between Australian English autistic and non-autistic adult listeners.
Assessed the ability to discern lexical items and categorize speech sounds.

Main Results:

Autistic adults successfully discerned lexical items and categorized speech sounds.
Automatic attunement to existing phoneme categories was not observed in the autistic group to the same extent as in non-autistic controls.
Autistic adults did not demonstrate perceptual retuning to novel talkers' speech.

Conclusions:

Autistic adults possess intact speech sound categorization but lack the automatic perceptual flexibility to adapt to novel talkers.
Findings challenge the universal application of current sensory theories, such as Bayesian decision theory, to speech and language processing in autism.
Highlights potential differences in how autistic individuals process dynamic speech information and adapt to variations in talker characteristics.