Led by Ceci, in collaboration with Sarah, Dr Nadine Lavan, Prof Sophie Scott and many others, the Vocal Communication Project explores how autistic and non-autistic adults experience, perceive and produce laughter and other vocal expressions, interpret human and AI-generated vocal emotions, and use vocal signals in everyday social interactions.

Vocal communication plays an essential role in everyday social interaction. Beyond spoken language, our vocalisations convey a wealth of emotional and social information that helps us connect with others. Laughter, for example, is often considered a spontaneous expression of happiness or amusement, such as when we cannot help laughing while watching a funny video. Yet laughter is much more than an emotional response. Imagine a friend telling a joke that you do not find particularly funny, but you laugh along anyway. In this situation, laughter serves a social rather than purely emotional purpose, expressing friendliness, politeness or a desire to connect. By communicating emotions and social intentions, laughter helps us establish and maintain relationships. My research explores how we experience, perceive and produce laughter, and how this seemingly simple vocal expression plays a complex role in human social communication.

Building on this interest in laughter, my research extends to the broader ways in which we perceive and interpret social and emotional information from voices. Just as laughter can communicate meanings beyond amusement, subtle variations in vocal expressions can reveal emotions, convey social intentions and shape our impressions of others. As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance, AI-generated voices and emotional vocalisations are becoming increasingly realistic, raising new questions about how we perceive and respond to vocal emotions. Can we distinguish human from AI-generated vocal emotions? Do we perceive and interpret them in the same way? Exploring these questions allows me to investigate not only how we recognise emotions and social meanings in voices, but also what makes a vocal expression sound genuinely human.

Underlying these research questions is a broader interest in how people differ in their experiences and interpretations of social communication, particularly between autistic and non-autistic individuals. Social interactions often involve subtle, ambiguous and context-dependent signals, and the ways in which we perceive and respond to these signals may vary across individuals. Through behavioural experiments, neuroimaging and investigations of naturalistic social interactions, my research examines similarities and differences between autistic and non-autistic people in how they experience, perceive and produce laughter, interpret voices and vocal emotions, and engage in social interactions. By identifying both shared and distinct patterns of social communication, I aim to better understand the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying vocal communication, and how different ways of interpreting and expressing social signals shape our everyday social experiences.

Ultimately, we hope this research will contribute to greater mutual understanding between autistic and non-autistic people, while helping to inform more inclusive and effective support for individuals who experience challenges in social communication.

Have any questions or would like to discuss the study in more detail?
Please do not hesitate to contact Ceci Qing Cai: ceciqing.cai@ucl.ac.uk.