Receptive prosody adaptation to contextual feedback in autistic young adults

Understanding spoken meaning requires adaptation to prosodic variability across speakers. Prior work shows autistic adolescents display reduced prosodic adaptivity despite intact perceptual sensitivity. The present study tested whether such reductions persist into adulthood.

We recruited 69 autistic young adults (19-30 years) to complete an online pretest-training-posttest paradigm. Participants categorized utterances along a continuum from statement to question intonation, with feedback provided during training. A separate oddball discrimination task assessed baseline sensitivity. Mixed-effects logistic regression compared these data to previously collected groups (autistic adolescents, non-autistic adolescents, and non-autistic young adults).

Autistic young adults demonstrated overall adequate discrimination and significant adaptive shifts in categorization after training. However, the magnitude of adaptation was smaller than in non-autistic peers.

Together findings suggest that autistic adults can adapt to prosodic input but do so less, pointing to reduced perceptual learning based on contextual feedback rather than reduced perceptual acuity.