Understanding Social Communication Differences in Autism Spectrum Disorder and First-Degree Relatives: A Study of Looking and Speaking

Lee, Michelle; Nayar, Kritika; Maltman, Nell; Hamburger, D.A.; Martin, Gary E.; Gordon, Peter; Losh, Molly

doi:10.1007/s10803-019-03969-3

Cited by 24 publications

(43 citation statements)

References 58 publications

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“…Our results indicate that not every pictorial stimulus may be equally good in order to differentiate the speech of people with ASD from the speech of peers with TD, particularly using natural language processing techniques. Prior evidence suggests that narrative context matters: participants with ASD exhibited more difficulties in less structured tasks, i.e., narratives of personal experiences or pictures from the Thematic Apperception Test [43,44]. On the contrary, Baixauli et al [6] reported no significant differences for the type of narrative used in several studies analyzed in their meta-analysis.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social language in autism spectrum disorder: A computational analysis of sentiment and linguistic abstraction

Chojnicka

Wawer

2020

PLoS ONE

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Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate impairments with pragmatic (social) language, including narrative skills and conversational abilities. We aimed to quantitatively characterize narrative performance in ASD using natural language processing techniques: sentiment and language abstraction analyses based on the Linguistic Category Model. Individuals with ASD and with typical development matched for age, gender, ethnicity, and verbal and nonverbal intelligence quotients produced language samples during two standardized tasks from the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, Second Edition assessment: Telling a Story from a Book and Description of a Picture. Only the narratives produced during the Book Task differed between ASD and control groups in terms of emotional polarity and language abstraction. Participants with typical development used words with positive sentiment more often in comparison to individuals with ASD. In the case of words with negative sentiment, the differences were marginally significant (participants with typical development used words with negative sentiment more often). The Book Task narratives of individuals with ASD were also characterized by a lower level of language abstraction than narratives of peers with typical development. Linguistic abstraction was strongly positively correlated with a higher number of words with emotional polarity. Neither linguistic abstraction nor emotional polarity correlated with participants' age or verbal and nonverbal IQ. The results support the promise of sentiment and language abstraction analyses as a useful tool for the quantitative, fully automated assessment of narrative abilities among individuals with ASD.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social language in autism spectrum disorder: A computational analysis of sentiment and linguistic abstraction

Chojnicka

Wawer

2020

PLoS ONE

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“…Difficulties include difficulties with reciprocity (i.e., building on a conversational partner's statement), overly formal language, off topic remarks, introduction of topics without providing adequate background information, and difficulties with suprasegmental features of speech such as reduced variation of intonation (de Villiers et al 2007;Paul 2012, 2013;Diehl et al 2009;Lam and Yeung 2012;Klusek et al 2014). Prior work suggests that individuals with ASD also demonstrate difficulties with narration (i.e., storytelling), with particular difficulty imbuing narratives with a psychological perspective to explain protagonists' actions and motivations (Colle et al 2008;Lee et al 2017Lee et al , 2019Losh and Capps 2003;Losh and Gordon 2014;Loveland et al 1990;Loveland and Tunali 1993;Tager-Flusberg and Sullivan 1995). Further, individuals with ASD appear to exhibit the greatest difficulty in communicative contexts that are lessstructured, emotionally evocative, and openended, with relative strengths in highly structured contexts such as wordless picture books (Losh and Capps 2003;Lee et al 2019).…”

Section: Current Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Prior work suggests that individuals with ASD also demonstrate difficulties with narration (i.e., storytelling), with particular difficulty imbuing narratives with a psychological perspective to explain protagonists' actions and motivations (Colle et al 2008;Lee et al 2017Lee et al , 2019Losh and Capps 2003;Losh and Gordon 2014;Loveland et al 1990;Loveland and Tunali 1993;Tager-Flusberg and Sullivan 1995). Further, individuals with ASD appear to exhibit the greatest difficulty in communicative contexts that are lessstructured, emotionally evocative, and openended, with relative strengths in highly structured contexts such as wordless picture books (Losh and Capps 2003;Lee et al 2019).…”

Section: Current Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

“…In an attempt to further characterize socialcommunicative phenotypes and potential contributions of visual attention differences in individuals with ASD and first-degree relatives, Lee et al (2019) examined narrative quality and patterns of visual attention during narration across two different contexts in individuals with ASD and their parents. The first was a more structured task during which individuals were asked to narrate a wordless picture book one page at a time.…”

Section: Origins Of Social Communication Differences In Asd and Firstmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Understanding Social-Communication Differences in Autism Spectrum Disorder and First-Degree Relatives

Lee¹,

Losh²

2020

Encyclopedia of Autism Spectrum Disorders

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Social communication deficits are a defining feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Evidence suggests that first-degree relatives of individuals with ASD also demonstrate differences in social communication that mirror those observed in ASD in quality but are subclinical in expression and not associated with impairment. Differences in attention and social processing may underlie the social communication impairments in ASD and more subtle differences observed in relatives. Understanding the roots of social communication phenotypes among clinically unaffected firstdegree relatives of individuals with ASD may be a particularly powerful way to understand the cognitive, neurobiological, and genetic contributors to core symptoms observed in ASD. This entry focuses on allocation of visual attention as a possible contributing mechanism to social communication profiles in individuals with ASD and their parents.

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“…Many studies have shown that individuals with ASD tend to look less at the eyes when exploring faces and more at the mouth ( Klin et al, 2002 ), spend less time looking at social features in scenes ( Lee et al, 2019 ) and demonstrate decrease gaze-language coordination ( Nayar et al, 2018 ) compared to controls. In parents of individuals with ASD, Lee et al (2019) additionally demonstrated that parents of individuals with ASD who met criteria for the BAP showed distinct gaze profiles when viewing emotionally evocative scenes depicted in the thematic apperception test (TAT), allotting greater attention to faces in scenes in which the faces were featured most prominently, and more attention toward the setting in more complex images with salient setting features. These differences in viewing patterns were associated with the quality of participants’ narratives when telling stories about these scenes (particularly in the group which met criteria for the BAP), suggesting that atypical attentional patterns importantly relate to social communication.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Unique Visual Attention Profile Associated With the FMR1 Premutation

et al. 2021

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Atypical visual attention patterns have been observed among carriers of the fragile X mental retardation gene (FMR1) premutation (PM), with some similarities to visual attention patterns observed in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and among clinically unaffected relatives of individuals with ASD. Patterns of visual attention could constitute biomarkers that can help to inform the neurocognitive profile of the PM, and that potentially span diagnostic boundaries. This study examined patterns of eye movement across an array of fixation measurements from three distinct eye-tracking tasks in order to investigate potentially overlapping profiles of visual attention among PM carriers, ASD parents, and parent controls. Logistic regression analyses were conducted to examine whether variables constituting a PM-specific looking profile were able to effectively predict group membership. Participants included 65PM female carriers, 188 ASD parents, and 84 parent controls. Analyses of fixations across the eye-tracking tasks, and their corresponding areas of interest, revealed a distinct visual attention pattern in carriers of the FMR1 PM, characterized by increased fixations on the mouth when viewing faces, more intense focus on bodies in socially complex scenes, and decreased fixations on salient characters and faces while narrating a wordless picture book. This set of variables was able to successfully differentiate individuals with the PM from controls (Sensitivity = 0.76, Specificity = 0.85, Accuracy = 0.77) as well as from ASD parents (Sensitivity = 0.70, Specificity = 0.80, Accuracy = 0.72), but did not show a strong distinction between ASD parents and controls (Accuracy = 0.62), indicating that this set of variables comprises a profile that is unique to PM carriers. Regarding predictive power, fixations toward the mouth when viewing faces was able to differentiate PM carriers from both ASD parents and controls, whereas fixations toward other social stimuli did not differentiate PM carriers from ASD parents, highlighting some overlap in visual attention patterns that could point toward shared neurobiological mechanisms. Results demonstrate a profile of visual attention that appears strongly associated with the FMR1 PM in women, and may constitute a meaningful biomarker.

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Understanding Social Communication Differences in Autism Spectrum Disorder and First-Degree Relatives: A Study of Looking and Speaking

Cited by 24 publications

References 58 publications

Social language in autism spectrum disorder: A computational analysis of sentiment and linguistic abstraction

Social language in autism spectrum disorder: A computational analysis of sentiment and linguistic abstraction

Understanding Social-Communication Differences in Autism Spectrum Disorder and First-Degree Relatives

A Unique Visual Attention Profile Associated With the FMR1 Premutation

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