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Abstract

*All authors contributed equally to this work
Iconic co-speech gestures enhance degraded speech comprehension in neurotypical adults. Nonetheless, the benefit of gestures in comprehending degraded speech has not been investigated in neurodivergent populations, such as autistic individuals. Previous research demonstrated atypical audiovisual and speech-gesture integration in autistic individuals, suggesting that integrating speech and gestures may be more challenging and less beneficial for speech comprehension in adverse listening conditions in comparison to neurotypicals. Conversely, autistic individuals could also benefit from additional cues to comprehend speech in noise, as they encounter difficulties in filtering relevant information from noise. In the present study, we investigated gestural enhancement of degraded speech in neurotypical and autistic adults. Participants were presented with videos of an actress uttering a Dutch action verb and had to complete a 4-alternative forced choice task. The action verb was produced in either clear or degraded speech and accompanied by a matching gesture or without a gesture. We observed a gestural enhancement effect in both neurotypical and autistic individuals, and no difference in the size of this effect between the groups. Our findings suggest that despite the previously reported differences in audiovisual integration and gesture interpretation, autistic individuals do benefit from gestures in degraded speech comprehension, similarly to neurotypicals. These findings provide relevant insights to improve communication practices with autistic individuals and to develop new interventions for speech comprehension.