Children with autism align syntax in natural conversation

Abstract

Previous experimental work has shown that verbal children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) converge linguistically, or align, with an interlocutor, and to the same extent as typical children. However, it is not known whether ASD children align in natural conversation. The studies presented in this paper aimed to address this issue. We measured syntactic alignment in ASD children, first using an experimental task, and second in natural conversation. We found that ASD and typical children aligned to the same extent in both tasks, suggesting that experimental findings about alignment in ASD are ecologically valid. We argue, however, that the experimental measurement of alignment overstates the prevalence of syntactic alignment in children's conversations.

“Is voice a marker for Autism spectrum disorder? A systematic review and meta‐analysis”

“…For examples, recent models of impaired perceptual and motor anticipation in ASD [Palmer, Paton, Kirkovski, Enticott, & Hohwy, ; Van de Cruys et al, ] would predict the presence of overcorrection in vocal production in ASD (e.g., bursts of jitter and shimmer). Further, models of social impairment in ASD could be tested by analyzing the acoustic dynamics involved in conversations, such as reciprocal prosodic adaptation and compensation [Dale, Fusaroli, Duran, & Richardson, ; Fusaroli, Raczaszek‐Leonardi, & Tylén, ; Fusaroli & Tylén, ; Hopkins, Yuill, & Keller, ; Lambrechts, Yarrow, Maras, & Gaigg, ; Pickering & Garrod, ; Slocombe et al, ].…”

Inhibitory control and lexical alignment in children with an autism spectrum disorder

“…We also wished to avoid ceiling effects in first-order theory of mind tasks found in previous studies (e.g. Hopkins, Yuill, & Keller, 2016).…”

Environmental constraints shaping constituent order in emerging communication systems: Structural iconicity, interactive alignment and conventionalization

“…Such adaptations have been observed in many interactional behaviors (Fusaroli, Konvalinka, & Wallot, 2014): from subtle bodily sway (Shockley, Santana, & Fowler, 2003), to speech rate, utterance length and phonetic profile (Fusaroli & Tylén, in press;Giles, Coupland, & Coupland, 1991), lexical , and conceptual alignment (Angus, Watson, Smith, Gallois, & Wiles, 2012;Garrod & Anderson, 1987;Garrod & Doherty, 1994). Likewise, a number of studies show that interlocutors tend to align on their use of syntactic constructions beyond particular tokens of referent events: If a speaker uses a double object construction (''the pirate gives the chef an apple") to refer to a ditransitive scene, there is a relatively higher probability that her interlocutor will spontaneously use the same construction to describe analogous but not identical scenes, even though the prepositional object construction (''the pirate gives an apple to the chef") is an equally acceptable alternative (Branigan, Pickering, McLean, & Cleland, 2007;Branigan, Pickering, Stewart, & McLean, 2000;Hopkins, Yuill, & Keller, 2015;Reitter & Moore, 2014). Rather than purely relying on the referent event (structural iconicity), speakers widely rely on the linguistic structures offered by their interlocutor.…”