Alexithymia is a multi-faceted construct consisting of: a) difficulties identifying and describing one's emotions, b) difficulty distinguishing emotional feelings from bodily sensations, c) an "externally-oriented thinking style" focused on external realities with limited self-reflective thought towards inner experience, and d) limited imagination and fantasy life (Nemiah et al., 1976).

While well-represented on clinical measures, co-speech gesture production has never been formally studied in autistic adults. Twenty-one verbally fluent autistic adults and 21 typically developing controls engaged in a controlled conversational task. Group differences were observed in both semantic/pragmatic and motoric features of spontaneously produced co-speech gestures. Autistic adults prioritized different functions of co-speech gesture. Specifically, they used gesture more than controls to facilitate conversational turn-taking, demonstrating a novel nonverbal strategy for regulating conversational dynamics. Autistic adults were more likely to gesture unilaterally than bilaterally, a motoric feature of gesture that was individually associated with autism symptoms. Co-speech gestures may provide a link between nonverbal communication symptoms and known differences in motor performance in autism.

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