Exploring Motor Speech Disorders in Low and Minimally Verbal Autistic Individuals: An Auditory-Perceptual Analysis.
Marc F Maffei, Karen V Chenausky, Abigail Haenssler and 3 others
PMID 38512040WHAT IT FOUND
Most low and minimally verbal autistic individuals showed speech motor impairments, primarily in articulation.
These speech difficulties were strongly linked to lower expressive and receptive language scores. This suggests motor speech issues may contribute to language limitations in this population.
Key findings
01Participants exhibited varying degrees of impairment across all speech subsystems, but features associated with the articulatory subsystem were most severely affected.
02Impairments in nearly all auditory-perceptual speech motor features were significantly negatively correlated with expressive language skills.
03Speech features linked to articulation (intelligibility, vowel precision, overall severity, consonant precision) had strong correlations with expressive language (number of different words).
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study did not include a control group of non-autistic children or children with known motor speech disorders, making it difficult to definitively diagnose conditions like childhood apraxia of speech. Raters relied on a mix of imitated and spontaneous speech, which may not fully capture the variability of motor planning deficits. The assessment of nonspeech oral motor skills was binary (correct/incorrect), lacking detail on the nature of the impairment. Expressive language was measured by the number of different words, which is inherently dependent on speech intelligibility; unintelligible attempts were not counted.
Declared interests
The study was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Autism Speaks Foundation. The authors declared no other conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the strong correlation between speech motor impairments and language scores as proof that motor deficits cause language delays. The study is cross-sectional and observational, so it cannot determine causality; language difficulties may stem from other factors or interact with motor issues in complex ways.