As children enter adolescence, the social world expands. Friends, classmates and unfamiliar adults begin to command more attention. For many teenagers, the brain itself appears to support that transition by treating new voices as increasingly rewarding.

That shift may not occur in the same way for autistic teens.

Brain scans from 71 participants between ages 7 and 21 found that reward and salience regions in autistic youths did not become more responsive to unfamiliar voices with age. Among participants with more pronounced autism traits, activity in some regions declined, according to Stanford Medicine.

Adolescence changes which voices capture the brain’s attention.

Voice Reward Systems Take Separate Developmental Paths

The study, published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, compared recordings of each participant’s mother with unfamiliar female voices. The speakers used meaningless words so researchers could measure reactions to vocal identity rather than language.

Typically developing adolescents showed greater reward-system activity for unfamiliar voices as they grew older. Prior research found that this transition often begins around age 13, when new speakers start to draw more neural attention than a parent’s voice, Stanford Medicine reported.

Autistic participants followed another course. Their response to their mother’s voice became stronger with age, particularly among those with greater social communication difficulties.

Unfamiliar voices become more rewarding for many teenagers.

Hearing Speech Is Only Part of the Process

The difference does not appear to reflect a simple inability to hear voices. A separate Stanford study found that auditory regions in autistic children responded normally to speech, while connections with a brain region involved in interpreting other people’s thoughts and emotions differed, according to Stanford Medicine.

Earlier scans also linked weaker reward and salience responses to a mother’s voice with greater social communication challenges in autistic children. Those results, published through eLife, suggested that the significance assigned to a voice can matter as much as its sound.

That developmental shift appears weaker in autistic teens.

Emotional Tone Can Shift With Context

Voice interpretation also depends on flexibility. Autistic adolescents performed as accurately as their peers when distinguishing vocal tones but adjusted their judgments less when surrounding examples changed, a 2024 study in Scientific Reports found.

The new findings do not suggest that autistic teenagers lack interest in friendship. Many actively seek close relationships. Instead, unfamiliar voices may not receive the automatic neural priority that helps other teens move toward new social partners.

Researchers now see adolescence as a possible window for more tailored support. Programs could help teens practice interpreting tone, recognizing socially relevant voices and navigating new interactions without treating one developmental pattern as the only acceptable path.