Distortions such as phoneme specific nasal emission
and lateralization may affect the social acceptability
of speech even if the overall intelligibility of
speech is not reduced. The children who produced
these distortions made no other types of errors.
Shriberg et al. (2001) reported similar ‘‘residual
articulation errors’’: dentalized sibilants, derhoticization
(for American speakers), lateralized sibilants and
labialized /l/, in their sample of 30 adolescents and
adults with ASDs. The participants in the Shriberg
et al. study (2001) were on average older than our
participants, suggesting that non-developmental distortions
such as these may persist in people with
ASDs. Moreover, we found no correlation between
chronological age and number of speech errors,
suggesting that non-developmental distortions occur
relatively frequently in the speech of children and
adults with ASDs and do not appear to resolve over
time. Articulation distortions, like abnormal prosody,
may not necessarily affect intelligibility, but they nevertheless represent a significant additional
social and communication barrier for people with
ASD.