Abstract
In dialogue, speakers tend to imitate, or align with, a partner’s language choices. Higher levels of alignment facilitate communication and can be elicited by affiliation goals. Since autistic children have interaction and communication impairments, we investigated whether a failure to display affiliative language imitation contributes to their conversational difficulties. We measured autistic children’s lexical alignment with a partner, following an ostracism manipulation which induces affiliative motivation in typical adults and children. While autistic children demonstrated lexical alignment, we observed no affiliative influence on ostracised children’s tendency to align, relative to controls. Our results suggest that increased language imitation—a potentially valuable form of social adaptation—is unavailable to autistic children, which may reflect their impaired affective understanding.
Highlights
Autism is characterised by deficits in social communication and social interaction (DSM-5; American Psychiatric Association, 2013), which can manifest in conversational language (Ying Sng et al, 2018)
We used our LMEMs to calculate Bayesian Information Criteria (BIC) values, as an alternative to classical hypothesis testing. We have taken this approach in previous work (Hopkins & Branigan, 2020) when—owing to a lack of prior studies examining the influence of ostracism on alignment—it has not been possible to determine sample size via traditional power analysis; power analyses require published effect sizes to establish the threshold beneath which a hypothesis would be rendered false
Autism is associated with clinically significant impairments of communication and social interaction (DSM-5; American Psychiatric Association, 2013), which manifest in conversation (Ying Sng et al, 2018)
Summary
Autism is characterised by deficits in social communication and social interaction (DSM-5; American Psychiatric Association, 2013), which can manifest in conversational language (Ying Sng et al, 2018). Autistic adults experience a heightened physiological response to ostracism, they do not interpret ostracism as emotionally significant to the same degree as non-clinical controls (Trimmer et al, 2017) Such findings may reflect the influence of alexithymic traits—difficulties with recognising and describing one’s own emotional states—which are prevalent in the autistic population (50% compared with 10% in the typical population; Bernhardt et al, 2014; Hill et al, 2004), and which are associated with language impairment (Hobson et al, 2019; Milosavljevic et al, 2016). If autistic children’s priming-based tendency to align were further strengthened by the concurrent action of social-affective mechanisms, those who experienced ostracism should lexically align with the experimenter to a greater extent than controls, consistent with typically-developing children (Hopkins & Branigan, 2020). A lack of difference in lexical alignment between the ostracised and included groups would be consistent with an impairment of socialaffective mechanisms of alignment in autistic children
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
