Kira Hall

KIRA HALL, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, was awarded funding in April 2021 to aid research on “Accent Imitation on the Autism Spectrum.” This project examines a kind of discourse behavior rarely addressed in autism scholarship but commonly noted by autistic individuals themselves: the adoption of a so-called “nonlocal” or “foreign” accent. Informed by theoretical perspectives in linguistic anthropology, the project seeks to come to a description of autistic acquisition of nonlocal accents that accounts for the intensely social and political nature of dialect acquisition and its possible agentive uses. With Wenner-Gren support, a faculty-student team involving researchers identifying as neurodivergent was assembled to assist with the collection, transcription, and analysis of data. Ethnographic interviews were conducted with 14 autistic individuals who reported using nonlocal accents. Preliminary findings suggest that interviewees connect their accents to the idea of  “masking” — the hiding or downplaying of autistic traits in order to seem more neurotypical. That is, rather than being a purely cognitive reaction, as psychologically oriented scholarship on autistic imitation might suggest, the use of nonlocal accents might be seen instead as a meaningful strategy for autistic individuals to hide potentially unusual speech patterns and better navigate a neurotypical social world. More broadly, this research emphasizes the need to consider autistic discourse behaviors such as these as socially meaningful.