Inner speech impairments in the service of executive performance in children with autism

Abstract

This study compared the use of inner speech and visuospatial working memory (WM) for the facilitation of executive performance in children with autism (CWA) and typically developing (TD) controls. Experiment 1 revealed that CWA did not recruit inner speech to facilitate arithmetic task-switching performance as there was no effect of inner speech suppression. However, Experiments 2 and 3 indicated that CWA did experience a disruption to performance with the suppression of visuospatial WM, which also resulted in a cost to performance in a task that required spatial visualisation (Experiment 4). Experiment 5 confirmed that inner speech impairments and the preservation of visuospatial WM in autism extend to the domain of planning. In sum, CWA demonstrate impairments in the use of inner speech to facilitate executive performance. However, they may compensate with the use of visuospatial WM resources. The implications of these results, for working memory accounts of executive performance in autism, are discussed.