Autism Research | 2021
Phonetic Inflexibility in Autistic Adults
Abstract
This study examined whether the atypical speech style that is frequently reported in autistic adults is underpinned by an inflexible production of phonetic targets. In a first task, 20 male autistic adults and 20 neuro‐typicals had to read and produce native vowels. To assess the extent to which phonetic inflexibility is due to an overall fine‐grained control of phonetic behavior or to a lack of flexibility in the realization of one s phonological repertoire, the second task asked participants to reproduce artificial vowel‐like sounds. Results confirmed the presence of a greater articulatory stability in the production of native vowels in autistic adults. When instructed to imitate artificial vowel‐like sounds, the autistic group did not better approximate the targets acoustic properties relative to neuro‐typicals but their performance at reproducing artificial vowels was less variable and influenced to a greater extent by the articulatory properties of their own vocalic space. These findings suggest that the greater articulatory stability observed in autistic adults arises from a lack of flexibility in the production of their own native vowels. The two phonetic tasks are devoid of any pragmatic constraint, which indicates that phonetic inflexibility in autism is partly independent of register selection.