An Exploratory Study of Imagining Sounds and "Hearing" Music in Autism.
Alex Bacon, C Philip Beaman, Fang Liu
PMID 31863231WHAT IT FOUND
People with autism reported less vivid sounds in their mind and less control over them than matched controls, especially for voice and environmental sounds.
They did not report fewer stuck songs.
Key findings
01People with autism reported less vivid sounds in their mind than controls for voice and environmental sounds, but the music comparison was inconclusive.
02People with autism reported less control over sounds in their mind than controls for verbal sounds, music and verbal/environmental sounds.
03The autism group did not report fewer stuck songs, and the evidence for more stuck songs was weak.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
The sample was small: 17 people with autism and 17 controls, and three autism participants plus their matched controls were removed from some analyses. The main measures were self-rated feelings about imagined sounds, not tests of hearing, speech, language or music performance. The result for music imagery was inconclusive, so the study does not show that music imagery is spared in autism. The study could not examine links between auditory imagery scores and stuck songs because the sample was too small for stable correlations. All participants had official autism diagnoses and were matched on age, musical training, non-verbal IQ and receptive vocabulary, so the findings may not apply to people with more severe language or cognitive impairment.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that people with autism have poorer hearing or speech because they scored lower on this questionnaire. The study asked participants to rate imagined sounds; it did not measure hearing or speech.