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Perception of Talker Age by Young Adults with High-Functioning Autism

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Abstract

People with high-functioning Autism (HFA) can accurately identify social categories from speech, but they have more difficulty connecting linguistic variation in the speech signal to social stereotypes associated with those categories. In the current study, the perception and evaluation of talker age by young adults with HFA was examined. The participants with HFA performed similarly to a typically-developing comparison group in age classification and estimation tasks. Moreover, the participants with HFA were able to differentiate among talkers of different ages in a language attitudes task and rated older talkers as more intelligent than younger talkers. These results suggest that people with HFA are able to make reasonable social judgments about talkers based on their speech, at least for familiar social categories and personally relevant social attitudes.

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Notes

  1. This analysis used responses from the listeners in Experiment 2 to predict responses from (different) listeners in Experiment 3. Qualitatively similar results are obtained if actual age is used as a predictor variable, which is not surprising given the correlation between perceived age and actual age.

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Acknowledgments

This research was partially funded by a seed grant from the Ohio State University Center for Cognitive Science. We thank Jeff Siegel, Bridget Smith, and Renee Devlin for their help with this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics, Ohio State University, 1712 Neil Avenue, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA

    Cynthia G. Clopper

  2. Department of Psychology, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    Kristin L. Rohrbeck & Laura Wagner

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  1. Cynthia G. Clopper
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Correspondence to Cynthia G. Clopper.

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Clopper, C.G., Rohrbeck, K.L. & Wagner, L. Perception of Talker Age by Young Adults with High-Functioning Autism. J Autism Dev Disord 43, 134–146 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-012-1553-5

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