Projects per year
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 anostracism 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.
Original language | English |
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Number of pages | 13 |
Journal | Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders |
Early online date | 8 Jun 2021 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 8 Jun 2021 |
Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)
- autism
- affiliation
- alignment
- conversation
- ostracism
- language imitation
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Dive into the research topics of 'Autistic children’s language imitation shows reduced sensitivity to ostracism'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Projects
- 1 Finished
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Conversational alignment in children with an Autistic Spectrum Condition and typically developing children
1/04/17 → 28/02/22
Project: Research