Conversational adaptation in children and teens with autism: Differences in talkativeness across contexts

Abstract

Successful social communication is complex; it relies on effectively deploying and continuously revising one's behavior to fit the needs of a given conversation, partner, and context. For example, a skilled conversationalist may instinctively become less talkative with a quiet partner and more talkative with a chattier one. Prior research suggests that behavioral flexibility across social contexts can be a particular challenge for individuals with autism spectrum condition (ASC), and that difficulty adapting to the changing needs of a conversation contributes to communicative breakdowns and poor social outcomes. In this study, we examine whether reduced conversational adaptation, as measured by talkativeness, differentiates 48 verbally fluent children and teens with ASC from 50 neurotypical (NT) peers matched on age, intelligence quotient, and sex ratio. Participants completed the Contextual Assessment of Social Skills with two novel conversation partners. The first acted interested in the conversation and talked more (Interested condition), while the second acted bored and talked less (Bored condition). Results revealed that NT participants emulated their conversation partner's behavior by being more talkative in the Interested condition as compared to the Bored condition (z = 9.92, p < 0.001). In contrast, the ASC group did not differentially adapt their behavior to the Bored versus Interested context, instead remaining consistently talkative in both (p = 0.88). The results of this study have implications for understanding social communication and behavioral adaptation in ASC, and may be valuable for clinicians interested in improving conversational competence in verbally fluent individuals with autism. Lay Summary Social communication—including everyday conversations—can be challenging for individuals on the autism spectrum. In successful conversations, people tend to adjust aspects of their language to be more similar to their partners'. In this study, we found that children and teens with autism did not change their own talkativeness in response to a social partner who was more or less talkative, whereas neurotypical peers did. These findings have clinical implications for improving conversational competence in verbally fluent individuals with autism.

Automatic speaker diarization for natural conversation analysis in autism clinical trials

“…Indeed, prior research has suggested that speech and language features produced by conversational partners can be used to predict an autism diagnosis 32,33 . In contrast, ASD participants tend not to adapt their talkativeness based on their partner's behaviour 34 . Together, these data suggest that low diarization precision does not necessarily lead to a poor estimation of the UD of a 15 participant.…”

Sex differences in social and emotional insight in youth with and without autism

“…Audio recordings of each conversation were orthographically transcribed by reliable annotators who were unaware of the participants’ diagnostic status and study hypotheses. Annotators were undergraduate student research assistants, trained on a modified Quick Transcription protocol for XTrans software [ 40 ]; all were trained on segmenting and transcription, with a minimum 92% word-level reliability criteria that must be met consistently before beginning to transcribe ([ 13 , 41 ] for a more detailed description of transcription process). Once a final transcript was created for each participant from the annotators, a graduate researcher removed features from the transcriptions including words or phrases relating to the sex, name, location, and other factors that could be identifying factors.…”

Topic maintenance in social conversation: What children need to learn and evidence this can be taught

“…‘Excessive talking’ is a socially negative behaviour leading to peer rejection (Green et al, 2014; Hoza et al, 2005). It is one of the key symptoms associated with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (see Green et al, 2014 for a review) and occurs in certain sub-groups of autistic children (Cola et al, 2022; Nadig et al, 2010) and the elderly (Pushkar et al, 2000; Yin & Peng, 2016). However, it is also a common phenomenon in typically-developing primary-school-age children (Abbot-Smith et al, under revision) and one which has been found to be negatively correlated with working memory and inhibitory control (Blain-Briere et al, 2014).…”

“…Indeed, among the healthy ageing, excessive verbosity is associated with poor emotion recognition (Ruffman et al, 2010). Without prior knowledge of a conversation partner's interest, it is the real-time rapid interpretation of his or her non-verbal affect which often provides the crucial clue as to whether the speaker should continue talking or not (Cola et al, 2022), in order for the conversation to be a co-operative act (Grice, 1975;Tomasello, 2019). Another relevant finding from the healthy ageing literature is that speakers considered 'overly verbose' tend to have poorer inhibitory control (Pushkar et al, 2000;Yin & Peng, 2016).…”

“…Children need to have the socio-cognitive capacity (and motivation) to treat conversation as collaborative in this way (Grice, 1975;Searle, 1995;Tomasello, 2019). Specifically, they need to be able to detect and interpret verbal (back-channelling) and non-verbal (facial/body affect) cues to listener interest (Cola et al, 2022;Pushkar et al, 2000), they need to be able to do so rapidly in real time and -moreover -they need sufficient executive functioning skills for managing the back-and-forth nature of conversation (Blain-Briere et al, 2014), particularly when this is about a topic of interest to themselves (Nadig et al, 2010). Finally, children also need to understand and use cues to engagement as appropriate for their culture(s).…”