Atypical Tactile Expressions Using Japanese Ideophones in Adults With Autism Spectrum Disorders.
Autistic adults understand tactile words yet pick highly personal labels, so confirm shared meaning before acting on texture reports.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Nakano et al. (2026) asked autistic and typical adults to pick Japanese sound-symbolic words for fabric feelings. These words, called ideophones, paint vivid pictures of texture.
Each person touched the same set of cloth swatches and chose the word that felt right. The team then compared which labels each group picked and how often they agreed.
What they found
Both groups understood the words the same way, but autistic adults used fewer labels and chose more personal, off-beat ones. Shared meaning was there; shared word choice was not.
In short, they knew what the words meant, yet they still named the same silk or sandpaper with their own quirky terms.
How this fits with other research
Cascio et al. (2008) showed autistic adults feel vibration and heat pain more, yet light touch feels normal. Tamami adds a new layer: the feeling is registered, but the name for it drifts.
Hense et al. (2019) found spatial touch mapping looks typical by adulthood. Tamami extends that idea, showing language for touch stays idiosyncratic even after spatial skills level out.
Bassett-Gunter et al. (2017) saw no difference in final meaning, only in timing. The same pattern pops up here: comprehension intact, route unusual.
Why it matters
When you ask an autistic client to describe a texture, don’t assume their word means the same as yours. Probe with follow-up questions or let them show you the feel. This small check can prevent confusion in sensory diets, clothing choices, or feeding programs where texture words guide decisions.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
PURPOSE: Japanese ideophones (onomatopoeia) constitute a unique lexical system that conveys complex sensations and emotions through embodied sound symbolism. Because adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show weak sensitivity to sound-symbolism, their engagement with ideophones may diverge from that of typically developing (TD) adults. We addressed this possibility in two experiments involving adults with ASD who have normal language abilities and no sensory-processing abnormalities. METHODS: In Study 1, thirty-one tactile ideophones were rated on five physical and two emotional dimensions using a semantic-differential questionnaire. In Study 2, participants palpated 15 fabrics and selected all ideophones that captured each sensation. RESULTS: In Study 1, mean ratings, representational-similarity matrices, and response variabilities did not differ between groups, indicating that ASD adults share a semantic understanding of ideophones with TD adults. In Study 2, group-level choice distributions and the fabric representational-similarity structure based on those choices again aligned across ASD and TD groups. However, multidimensional scaling of individual choice profiles revealed pronounced dispersion in ASD. Two factors accounted for this variability: ASD participants selected fewer ideophones per fabric, and their ideophone combinations were highly idiosyncratic, whereas ideophone combinations were widely shared among TD individuals. CONCLUSION: Taken together, the results show that adults with ASD possess intact semantic representations of tactile ideophones yet adopt a more restricted and individualized strategy when translating concrete sensory experiences into linguistic expressions. This localized, less convergent usage may contribute to the qualitative communication difficulties often observed in ASD, despite intact lexical-semantic knowledge and representational similarity structures.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2026 · doi:10.4992/psycholres1954.10.157