The linguistic profile of people with Autism spectrum disorders typically involves intact perceptual processing, accompanied by deficits in the social functions of language. In a series of three experiments, the impact of this profile on the perception of regional dialect was examined. Young adults with High-Functioning Autism exhibited similar performance to a typically developing comparison group in regional dialect classification and localness rating tasks, suggesting that they can use indexical information in speech to make judgments about the regional background of unfamiliar talkers. However, the participants with High-Functioning Autism were less able to differentiate among the dialects in a language attitudes task, suggesting that they do not share social stereotypes related to dialect variation with the typically developing comparison group.

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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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