A Study of the Relationship between Social Communication Skills and Sensitivity to Paralanguage

Abstract

Sixty office workers at a temporary employment agency were surveyed for their Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ) and Sensitivity to Paralanguage (SP) scores. The SP measure contains 12 questions and requires participants to guess the nature of the social relationship between two people based on a 30-second acoustic sample of their dialogue. Paralanguage was selected for investigation in this study rather than nonverbal aspects of communication because people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) tendencies — who tend to avoid looking at the face of the interlocutor — still use paralanguage effectively. Social communication skills (SCS) were defined as the sum of scores from the AQ subscales “Social skills” and “Communication”, and participants were categorized into either high or low SCS groups. Five participants had AQ scores of 26 or more, including one participant with an AQ score of 36. The five high AQ scorers were all male and all in the low SCS group. The low SCS group had a mean SP score that was 0.47 points higher than the high SCS group. The results indicate that people with poor SCS were more effective in guessing the social relationship between the two parties based on paralanguage than those with high SCS. There are two possible explanations for this finding. The first is that the SP test favors people with ASD tendencies in the low SCS group. The second is that the high SCS group may typically rely on senses other than hearing when making social judgments. In future, the reasons for our finding may be clarified by creating a “sensitivity to nonverbal cues” measurement that uses only visual information.