Event:

Abstract:
Social-pragmatic communication (SPC) difficulties are a core feature of autism and include challenges interpreting speakers’ intentions and following conversations. Listeners infer meaning and communicative intent partly from prosody, using acoustic cues such as pitch and duration to identify stress within words and prominence within sentences. Because the interpretation of these cues depends on context, SPC differences may relate both to how listeners weight current acoustic evidence and to how recent sounds and judgments influence subsequent perception. We examined these possibilities in 174 adults, including 14 reporting an autism diagnosis. Participants rated relative stress in pseudowords and prominence in a German sentence with independently manipulated pitch and duration, and completed the Conversation Questionnaire. Mixed-effects models estimated current acoustic effects, preceding acoustic and response effects, and their moderation by SPC, task, and response time. Current pitch and duration guided judgments, while preceding acoustics produced repulsive carryover and preceding responses produced attractive carryover. Greater SPC difficulties were associated with stronger response attraction, particularly for sentence prominence and among faster judgments. This association persisted after excluding diagnosed participants. Greater SPC difficulties were also associated with stronger pitch weighting in lexical stress, with no corresponding association for sentence prominence or duration; the pitch association was not supported after excluding diagnosed participants. SPC did not reliably moderate acoustic history. These findings link SPC differences most consistently to stronger carryover of recent prosodic judgments, alongside task-specific pitch weighting. Stronger response carryover may affect how listeners update prosodic interpretations as speech unfolds, providing a candidate link between perceptual history and everyday communication difficulties.

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