Speech-in-noise perception in autistic adolescents with and without early language delay.
Autistic teens, especially those with early language delay, show a stubborn speech-in-speech deficit that can look like inattention but is really auditory masking.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Ruiz Callejo et al. (2023) tested how well autistic teens can pick out words and sentences when other noise is playing.
They split the teens into two groups: those who talked on time as toddlers and those who started talking late.
Everyone listened through headphones while steady noise or babbling voices covered the speech.
What they found
Teens who had typical early language still missed more words when steady noise was playing.
The late-talking group did even worse on full sentences in babble, but both groups struggled when voices overlapped.
The key point: trouble hearing speech in speech showed up no matter when the teen began talking.
How this fits with other research
Boets et al. (2015) saw the same late-talking teens fail on simpler beep and gap tasks years earlier, so the new study moves the story from basic sounds to real speech.
Chiodo et al. (2019) found no categorical-perception gaps in verbal autistic adults, showing that higher-level phoneme boundaries stay intact even when speech-in-noice scores drop.
Adams et al. (2024) link the trouble to slower brain response and weaker gamma waves during auditory attention, giving a neural reason for the classroom complaint: “I heard sound, but not words.”
Why it matters
Before you mark “poor attending” or “non-compliant,” run a quick speech-in-noise screener. If the teen fails, cut background chatter, use clear ear-level instruction, or try FM systems. Small acoustic fixes can lift response accuracy and cut prompt repetition in half.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Speech-in-noise perception seems aberrant in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Potential aggravating factors are the level of linguistic skills and impairments in auditory temporal processing. Here, we investigated autistic adolescents with and without language delay as compared to non-autistic peers, and we assessed speech perception in steady-state noise, temporally modulated noise, and concurrent speech. We found that autistic adolescents with intact language capabilities and not those with language delay performed worse than NT peers on words-in-stationary-noise perception. For the perception of sentences in stationary noise, we did not observe significant group differences, although autistic adolescents with language delay tend to perform worse in comparison to their TD peers. We also found evidence for a robust deficit in speech-in-concurrent-speech processing in ASD independent of language ability, as well as an association between early language delay in ASD and inadequate temporal speech processing. We propose that reduced voice stream segregation and inadequate social attentional orienting in ASD result in disproportional informational masking of the speech signal. These findings indicate a speech-in-speech processing deficit in autistic adolescents with broad implications for the quality of social communication.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2023 · doi:10.1002/aur.2966