Global Similarities and Multifaceted Differences in the Production of Partner-Specific Referential Pacts by Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Abstract

Over repeated reference conversational partners tend to converge on preferred terms or referential pacts. Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterized by pragmatic difficulties that are best captured by less structured tasks. To this end we tested adults with ASD who did not have language or intellectual impairments, and neurotypical comparison participants in a referential communication task. Participants were directors, describing unlexicalized, complex novel stimuli over repeated rounds of interaction. Group comparisons with respect to referential efficiency showed that directors with ASD demonstrated typical lexical entrainment: they became faster over repeated rounds and used shortened referential forms. ASD and neurotypical groups did not differ with respect to the number of descriptors they provided or the number of exchanges needed for matchers to identify figures. Despite these similarities the ASD group was slightly slower overall. We examined partner-specific effects by manipulating the common ground shared with the matcher. As expected, neurotypical directors maintained referential precedents when speaking to the same matcher but not with a new matcher. Directors with ASD were qualitatively similar but displayed a less pronounced distinction between matchers. However, significant differences and different patterns of reference emerged over time; neurotypical directors incorporated the new matcher's contributions into descriptions, whereas directors with ASD were less likely to do so.

When do Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder Take Common Ground into Account During Communication?

“…Compared to TD groups that are well‐matched for chronological age, nonverbal IQ and formal language (syntax or vocabulary), ASD groups usually underperform in the production of appropriately informative referring expressions during narrative tasks [Colle, Baron‐Cohen, Wheelwright, & van Der Lely, ; Suh et al, ; Banney, Harper‐Hill, & Arnott, ; Arnold, Bennetto, & Diehl, ]. The same has been found in production studies that have used interactive experimental manipulations of the participant and interlocutor's shared visual perspective [Nadig, Vivanti, & Ozonoff, ; Fukumura, ; Dahlgren & Dahlgren Sandberg, ; Volden, Mulcahy, & Holdgrafer, ; Nadig, Seth, & Sasson, ]. That said, one study that used a very simple narrative elicitation task [Kuijper, Hartman, & Hendriks, ] found no differences between children and adolescents with ASD and TD controls.…”

Communicative misalignment in Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…Yet, individuals with ASD struggled to align the conceptualizations of their communicative signals with those of their interaction partners when the problem space afforded multiple solutions. This impairment could be isolated because the novel communicative setting prevented access to pre-existing contextual cues that cognitively-able individuals with ASD can capitalize on to resolve ambiguity (Au-Yeung, Kaakinen, Liversedge, & Benson, 2015;Birmingham, Stanley, Nair, & Adolphs, 2015;Branigan, Tosi, & Gillespie-Smith, 2016;Brewer, Biotti, Bird, & Cook, 2017;Hahn, Snedeker, & Rabagliati, 2015;Nadig, Seth, & Sasson, 2015;Pijnacker, Hagoort, Buitelaar, Teunisse, & Geurts, 2009) . Under these experimentally-generated conditions, built to recreate the fleeting ambiguities of everyday interaction, communication requires more than pruning a decision tree of possible signals or iteratively optimizing behavioral outcomes (Botvinick & Weinstein, 2014;Donoso, Collins, & Koechlin, 2014;Keysers & Perrett, 2004) .…”

Collaborative competence in dialogue: Pragmatic language impairment as a window onto the psychopathology of autism

“…Similarly speakers with autism can successfully complete structured pragmatic tasks (e.g. Nadig et al, 2009;Nadig, Seth, & Sasson, 2015) but continue to demonstrate difficulties in naturalistic contexts. Previous research in conversation analysis has reported that children with autism can use eye gaze for different purposes, subtly meshed with gesture and vocalisation, but do so inconsistently (Dickerson, Rae, Stribling, Dautenhahn, & Werry, 2005).…”

“…One perspective on the development of pragmatic abilities is based on the notion that very young children's social interactions, especially when supported by competent communicative partners, enable them to acquire social understanding and pragmatic ability through activity, conceptualised variously as 'naïve participation' (Fernyhough, 2008) or 'use before meaning' (Nelson, 1996). Writers in this tradition view the child's access to the social, interpersonal context as primary in development, providing the attuned, collaborative exchanges from which cognition and language are moulded (Trevarthen & Aitken, 2001;Vygotsky, 1978).…”