Autistic children’s language imitation shows reduced sensitivity to ostracism

Zoe L. Hopkins*, Nicola Yuill, Holly P. Branigan

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

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 languageEnglish
Number of pages13
JournalJournal of Autism and Developmental Disorders
Early online date8 Jun 2021
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 8 Jun 2021

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • autism
  • affiliation
  • alignment
  • conversation
  • ostracism
  • language imitation

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