Comparison of auditory stimulus processing in normal and autistic adolescents.

The team asked autistic and neurotypical teens to speak while hearing their own voice delayed or masked by noise.

They timed how long each group kept talking and how loud they stayed under these weird feedback conditions.

Both groups shortened their speech and dropped their volume the same amount.

No sign that autistic teens ‘tune out’ their own speech more than peers.

Boets et al. (2015) and Ruiz Callejo et al. (2023) later showed autistic teens with early language delay do worse on fine-grained pitch and speech-in-noise tasks. The 1981 null result still holds for basic loudness and duration, but the newer work says you must split the group by language history to see real auditory gaps.

van Laarhoven et al. (2019) moved from behavior to brain: autistic adults failed to dampen their own tone sounds, a neural sign of weak predictive coding. Together these papers paint a picture—autistic people sense self-produced sound normally, yet their brain does not quiet it the way typical brains do.

Redquest et al. (2021) added skin-conductance and MEG data showing slower habituation to repeated beeps. The 1981 study saw no behavioral habituation difference, but the 2021 physiological follow-up shows the body and brain are still reacting longer in autism.

When a teen with autism seems to ignore your instructions, do not assume they are ‘tuning out’ auditory input. Check language history and run quick speech-in-noise probes first. If the child had early language delay, lower the noise level or use visual cues before you label the issue as attention or defiance.