Sensory Integration and Implications on Understanding Speech

Many of us on the spectrum report a lot of difficulty making out what people are saying. Some of us have been additionally diagnosed with auditory processing disorder (sorry about the "in children" insistence in that article--it's otherwise a good article and the info is true of adults as well). Difficulty separating foreground from background noise is commonly reported. Earlier this year I posted on mono-sensing and understanding speech and questioned whether difficulty integrating vision and hearing might contribute to auditory processing issues.

Now it seems like there's some science backing up our experiences from City College of New York's Dr. John J. Foxe,

"Sensory integration dysfunction has long been speculated to be a core component of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) but there has been precious little hard empirical evidence to support this notion. Viewing a speaker's articulatory movements can greatly improve a listener's ability to understand spoken words, and this is especially the case under noisy environmental conditions.

"These results are the first of their kind to verify that children with autism have substantial difficulties in these situations..."

Foxe goes on to describe the implications this has for classrooms--that smaller, quieter classrooms that are more accommodating of auditory processing difficulties are a good idea.

"Being able to detect speech in noise plays a vital role in how we communicate with each other because our listening environments are almost never quiet. Even the hum of air conditioners or fans that we can easily ignore may adversely impact these children's ability to understand speech in the classroom."

Again, children children children, but these issues are definitely not limited to children! The science doesn't generalize, but the concepts likely do (at least they do in my experience as an N of 1). Environmental system hums, lighting hums, the shuffling of papers and clattering of pens and shifting in seats--all things that as a graduate student I fight through in order to make out what the instructor is saying. And background noise is always there--it does not "turn off." This makes listening to speech something that is exhausting, fades in and out, and is deeply unreliable.

Autism may be less "mysterious" when our experience of the world, such as our experience of others' speech, is better understood. This can pave the way to more accommodating environments which may lead to more opportunities and a higher quality of life.

image is a spectrogram of a man saying "19th century," source wikipedia