Author:

Keywords:

Science & Technology, Social Sciences, Life Sciences & Biomedicine, Behavioral Sciences, Psychology, Developmental, Psychology, SPECTRUM DISORDER, LANGUAGE, TRANSMISSION, ACQUISITION, HYPOTHESIS, EXPOSURE, SPEECH, Humans, Male, Female, Child, Speech Perception, Italy, Autistic Disorder, Child, Preschool, 1103 Clinical Sciences, 1109 Neurosciences, 1701 Psychology, Developmental & Child Psychology, 3209 Neurosciences, 5201 Applied and developmental psychology, 5203 Clinical and health psychology

Abstract:

Autistic children are frequently said to speak with accents that markedly differ from those of their linguistic communities. To date, these anecdotal reports have never been tested or explained. We ran two perception studies using short audio recordings of autistic and typically developing children from the Campania region in Italy. The variety of Italian to which children are exposed in this region markedly differs from those spoken in the rest of Italy. Participant responses about the children's geographical origin show: (a) That autistic children's accent is devoid of the regional features of their community; (b) resembles the standard variety used in cartoons and child television programs. The judgments about children's accents are, furthermore, independent of the overall perception of speech atypicality. This paper shows that the accent of autistic children may diverge from that of their caregivers and peers because of the lasting influence of non-interactional, screen sources on their speech.