Conversational correlates of rapid social judgments of children and adolescents with and without ASD

ABSTRACT

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by deficits in social communication, and even children with ASD with preserved language are often perceived as socially awkward. We ask if linguistic patterns are associated with social perceptions of speakers. Twenty-one adolescents with ASD participated in conversations with an adult; each conversation was then rated for the social dimensions of likability, outgoingness, social skilfulness, responsiveness, and fluency. Conversations were analysed for responses to questions, pauses, and acoustic variables. Wide intonation ranges and more pauses within children’s own conversational turn were predictors of more positive social ratings while failure to respond to one’s conversational partner, faster syllable rate, and smaller quantity of speech were negative predictors of social perceptions.

KEYWORDS:

• Autism spectrum disorders
• social perception
• social skills
• prosody
• child

Acknowledgments

We thank Anna Schmid for data collection and Grace Connolly, Emily Zane, Julia Mertens, and Maria Bell at the FACE Lab for data processing. We are grateful to the children and families who gave their time to support this study. Data from this paper were presented in poster format at the International Meeting for Autism Research in San Francisco, CA in May of 2017.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Notes

¹ The first edition of the ADOS was used because data were collected prior to the revision of the ADOS in 2012.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by NIH grants NIDCD R21 DC010867-01 (Grossman, PI) and NIDCD R01 DC012774-01 (Grossman, PI).