This sounds very cool! Looking forward to reading it

Very sad!

That would be very interesting to look at! Nothing came of it though?

Unfortunately, while autism in adulthood is already a much smaller field than in childhood, there's really very little research on aging in autism.
Trying to set up a project involving APD, hearing loss, and neurodivergence though, so hopefully I can say more on this some day!

Thanks Riccardo! I would guess that hearing loss would make it worse, since it typically affects SNR. But I imagine it would depend on the type of hearing loss, as wearing Loops for example reduces everything, but thereby really helps understanding speech in noise.

I just reposted! Here's the link: doi.org/10.1177/1362...
And indeed, the overlap between APD and neurodivergence is super interesting. Seems fairly recognized in children, but then (seemingly) ignored in autistic adults. But it definitely seems to be a common, and persistent, challenge!

I'm posting about this because Elena is not on Bluesky, but she was the one doing most of the work, as this was her masters thesis project. I personally wanted to see a project like this for a while so im excited it finally became reality! Thanks Elena!

Why are these results interesting? I hope it brings awareness to those who may not realize this is a common challenge and not something they are struggling with alone. More research can also bring better understanding of the underlying issues so we can think about how to accommodate these challenges

The lack of difference between self identifying and clinically diagnosed individuals is likely due to statistical power. But the equivalence tests shows the importance of digging into this further, as those who self identify are also reporting similar experiences to those with a clinical dx

What about the self-identifying group? They also differed significantly from nonautistic adults in the Speech domain. But interestingly, equivalence tests showed that their reports were statistically equivalent to the clinically diagnosed group! Indeed, plotting the group predictions highlights this

We found that, across all domains of the SSQ (spatial perception, quality of sound, and speech understanding), the clinically diagnosed group reported more difficulties than the nonautistic group.

We used the Speech, Spatial and Qualities of Hearing Scale (SSQ) as a simple, short survey to see whether autistic adults indeed report lower auditory processing abilities than non autistic adults. We surveyed both clinically-diagnosed individuals and those who self-identify as autistic.

Differences in sensory processing between autistic and nonautistic people are well known, I think, in general terms. But I've heard anecdotes for quite a while that autistic people find speech processing, particularly in noise, very challenging. But there didn't seem to be much evidence for it.

Very cool! More evidence that passive, or even just non-interactive tasks just aren't going to get us the whole picture if we want to understand a typically interactive phenomenon, like language use

This really gives some fresh motivation that we are contributing something meaningful to the research community. We'll keep working to make multimodal research methods free to read, free to use, free to learn, and free to build upon. (Thanks for that excellent quote @babajideowoyele.bsky.social !)

Thank you! Im glad people are finding some value in it

Im looking forward to meeting the other nominees at the Open Science Festival in a few weeks in Groningen! So cool to see all these fantastic initiatives for more open science

The U.S. powers-that-be still want us to die or vanish into hyper-compliance that makes us more vulnerable to victimization: blogs.exeter.ac.uk/exploringdia...