Auditory and Semantic Processing of Speech-in-Noise in Autism: A Behavioral and EEG Study.
Jiayin Li, Maleeha Sujawal, Zivile Bernotaite and 2 others
PMID 40755170WHAT IT FOUND
Autistic adults judged sentences as accurately as non-autistic adults in quiet and noise, but their brains showed weaker early speech tracking and delayed semantic processing.
They also did not flexibly adjust brain responses to different background noises.
Key findings
01Autistic and non-autistic adults had similar accuracy when judging sentence acceptability in quiet, babble noise and competing speech noise.
02Autistic adults showed a weaker early brain response to the speech envelope and delayed onset of the semantic brain response, while overall speech tracking and semantic response amplitude were similar between groups.
03Non-autistic adults showed condition differences in later auditory and semantic brain responses, but autistic adults did not.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The participants were right-handed native English speakers with normal hearing and no current speech, language or communication needs, so the findings may not apply to autistic people with hearing loss, language impairment or different languages. The groups were matched on age, nonverbal reasoning, vocabulary, working memory and musical training, which limits generalizability to the broader autistic population. The task was simple, judging only the final word, and baseline accuracy was near ceiling, so it may not detect real-world comprehension differences. The sample size may be underpowered for subtle group effects, and the group neural differences were small. Some N400 amplitude outliers were retained. This reflects heterogeneity and may have affected group patterns.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest. The article metadata lists non-U.S. government research support.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that autistic adults understand speech in noise worse than non-autistic adults. Their behavioral accuracy was comparable across quiet, babble and competing speech, and the participants had normal hearing, native English and no current speech, language or communication needs.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →