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Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is often associated with impaired perspective-taking skills. Deception is an important indicator of perspective-taking, and therefore may be thought to pose difficulties to people with ASD (e.g., Baron-Cohen in J Child Psychol Psychiatry 3:1141-1155, 1992). To test this hypothesis, we asked participants with and without ASD to play a computerised deception game. We found that participants with ASD were equally likely--and in complex cases of deception even more likely--to deceive and detect deception, and learned deception at a faster rate. However, participants with ASD initially deceived less frequently, and were slower at detecting deception. These results suggest that people with ASD readily engage in deception but may do so through conscious and effortful reasoning about other people's perspective.

Subjective impressions of speech delivery in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) as monotonic or over-precise are widespread but still lack robust acoustic evidence. This study provides a detailed acoustic characterization of the specificities of speech in individuals with ASD using an extensive sample of speech data, from the production of narratives and from spontaneous conversation. Syllable-level analyses (30,843 tokens in total) were performed on audio recordings from two sub-tasks of the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule from 20 adults with ASD and 20 pairwise matched neuro-typical adults, providing acoustic measures of fundamental frequency, jitter, shimmer and the first three formants. The results suggest that participants with ASD display a greater articulatory stability in vowel production than neuro-typical participants, both in phonation and articulatory gestures.

We have documented the significant presence of spontaneous and productive use of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in the speech of five Tunisian boys with autism, an unusual phenomenon. In typical development, MSA is not fully acquired before the late school years. The Arabic language in Tunisia is in a state of diglossia, and (unlike the colloquial Tunisian Arabic variety) MSA is virtually never used in everyday conversation. Television programs broadcast across the Arabic-speaking world constitute the most important source of MSA for preschool children. Typically developing children require active social interaction to develop language, but some children with autism may use television and cartoons as noninteractional input to acquire language. This study highlighted the existence of a noninteractional language-learning strategy that may partly compensate for the sociopragmatic deficits that characterize autism.

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is often described as being characterised by a uniform pragmatic impairment. However, recent evidence suggests that some areas of pragmatic functioning are preserved. This study seeks to determine to which extent context-based derivation of non-linguistically encoded meaning is functional in ASD. We compare the performance of 24 adults with ASD, and matched neuro-typical adults in two act-out pragmatic tasks. The first task examines generation of indirect request interpretations, and the second the comprehension of irony. Intact contextual comprehension of indirect requests contrasts with marked difficulties in understanding irony. These results suggest that preserved pragmatics in ASD is limited to egocentric processing of context, which does not rely on assumptions about the speaker's mental states.

This study assesses the extent to which children with autism understand requests performed with grammatically non-imperative sentence types. Ten children with autism were videotaped in naturalistic conditions. Four grammatical sentence types were distinguished: imperative, declarative, interrogative and sub-sentential. For each category, the proportion of requests complied with significantly exceeded the proportion of requests not complied with, and no difference across categories was found. These results show that children with autism do not rely exclusively on the linguistic form to interpret an utterance as a request. (Contains 1 note and 2 tables.)

In this study, we report an extensive investigation of the structural language and acoustical specificities of the spontaneous speech of ten three- to five-year-old verbal autistic children. The autistic children were compared to a group of ten typically developing children matched pairwise on chronological age, nonverbal IQ and socioeconomic status, and groupwise on verbal IQ and gender on various measures of structural language (phonetic inventory, lexical diversity and morpho-syntactic complexity) and a series of acoustical measures of speech (mean and range fundamental frequency, a formant dispersion index, syllable duration, jitter and shimmer). Results showed that, overall, the structure and acoustics of the verbal autistic children's speech were highly similar to those of the TD children. Few remaining atypicalities in the speech of autistic children lay in a restricted use of different vocabulary items, a somewhat diminished morpho-syntactic complexity, and a slightly exaggerated syllable duration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many autistics report being distressed by eye contact, but eye-tracking studies suggest that eye contact is associated with hypo-arousal rather than hyper-arousal in autism. Within a live face-to-face paradigm combining a wearable eye-tracker with electrodermal activity sensors, 80 adults (40 autistics) defined words in front of an experimenter either staring at their eyes (direct gaze condition) or looking elsewhere (averted gaze condition). Autistics did not differ from neurotypicals in their eye behaviours nor their skin conductance responses. Autistics did not appear distressed when they were looking at the experimenter's eyes in the direct gaze condition. However, neurotypicals, compared to autistics, might experience more stress when looking at the experimenter in the averted gaze condition, even after controlling for social anxiety and alexithymia. In comparison to autistics, neurotypicals might be hyper-aroused when they look at someone avoiding eye contact. Based on a bidirectional perspective on interactional difficulties in autism, we speculate that the neurotypicals' distress when their attempts to eye contact are not reciprocated could make their behaviour insistent, which, in turn, could make the autistics uncomfortable. In our study, participants' partner remained passive, displaying no specific reaction when a mutual gaze was shared or not. Future studies should test different partner reactions to gaze in various social contexts. What is already known about the topic? Autistics are usually reported to share less eye contact than neurotypicals with their interlocutors. However, the reason why autistics might pay less attention to eyes looking at them is still unknown: some autistics express being hyper-aroused by this eye contact, while some eye-tracking studies suggest that eye contact is associated with hypo-arousal in autism. What this paper adds? This study is based on a highly controlled live face-to-face paradigm, combining a wearable eye-tracker (to study eye behaviours) with electrodermal activity sensors (to assess potential stress). We draw a nuanced picture of social attention in autism, as our autistic participants did not differ from our neurotypical group in their eye behaviours nor their skin conductance responses. However, we found that neurotypicals, compared to autistics, seemed to be much more distressed when their interlocutor did not gaze at them during the experiment. Implications for practice, research or policy: Our study encourages to consider social interaction difficulties in autism as a relational issue, instead as an individual deficit. This step might be first taken in research, by implementing paradigms sensitive to the experimenter's role and attitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Our study addresses three main questions: (a) Do autistics and neurotypicals produce different patterns of disfluencies, depending on the experimenter's direct versus averted gaze? (b) Are these patterns correlated to gender, skin conductance responses, fixations on the experimenter's face, alexithymia, or social anxiety scores? Lastly, (c) can eye-tracking and electrodermal activity data be used in distinguishing listener- versus speaker-oriented disfluencies? Method: Within a live face-to-face paradigm combining a wearable eye-tracker with electrodermal activity sensors, 80 adults (40 autistics, 40 neurotypicals) defined words in front of an experimenter who was either staring at their eyes (direct gaze condition) or looking elsewhere (averted gaze condition). Results: Autistics produce less listener-oriented (uh, um) and more speaker-oriented (prolongations, breath) disfluencies than neurotypicals. In both groups, men produce less um than women. Both autistics' and neurotypicals' speech are influenced by whether their interlocutor systematically looks at them in the eyes or not, but their reactions go in opposite directions. Disfluencies seem to primarily be linguistic phenomena as experienced stress, social attention, alexithymia, and social anxiety scores do not influence any of the reported results. Finally, eye-tracking and electrodermal activity data suggest that laughter could be a listener-oriented disfluency. Conclusions: This article studies disfluencies in a fine-grained way in autistic and neurotypical adults while controlling for social attention, experienced stress, and experimental condition (direct vs. averted gaze). It adds to current literature by (a) enlightening our knowledge of speech in autism, (b) opening new perspectives on disfluency patterns as important signals in social interaction, (c) addressing theoretical issues on the dichotomy between listener- and speaker-oriented disfluencies, and (d) considering understudied phenomena as potential disfluencies (e.g., laughter, breath). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many autistic children, speech onset is delayed and expressive language emerges after 3 years of age. We qualitatively and quantitatively describe oral productions of autistic preschoolers, including many non- or minimally speaking, recorded during interactions with a caregiver and with an experimenter. Data clustering on manually coded oral production samples indicates five validated linguistic profiles of oral production in this diverse and inclusive sample (n = 59) of 3- to 5-year-old autistic children with highly variable expressive language abilities. These profiles are then compared on a series of demographic (age, socioeconomic status) and psychometric (autism severity, nonverbal and verbal IQ) measures, as well as on additional measures of language (expressive vocabulary, phonetic inventories). Two clusters are composed of speaking autistic children, while the three others comprise non- or minimally speaking children with qualitatively different patterns of vocal productions. The five-profile division suggests that traditional binary division of speaking vs nonspeaking children does not do justice to the complexity of early expressive language in autism. For most autistic children, spoken language emergence and development happen after the age of 3. Once they start developing and using spoken language, some eventually manage to reach typical levels of language abilities, while others remain minimally speaking into adulthood. It is therefore difficult to consider young autistic preschoolers as a homogeneous group in terms of spoken language levels. In our study, we breakdown a representative and inclusive group of children on the spectrum aged from 3 to 5 into five subgroups that correspond to different linguistic profiles. To do so, we qualitatively described children's (pre)verbal productions elicited during interactions with a parent and with an experimenter. We then used a type of statistical analysis called cluster analysis to group together the children that had a similar expressive (pre)linguistic behavior. Using this analysis, we were able to delineate five linguistic profiles with qualitatively different patterns of vocal production. Two of these profiles are composed of speaking children; the three others are composed of non- or minimally speaking children. Our findings show that traditional binary division of speaking versus nonspeaking autistic children is not precise enough to describe the heterogeneity of early spoken language in young autistic children. They also support the use of qualitative descriptions of vocal productions and speech to accurately document children's level of language, which could, in turn, help design very finely tailored language intervention specific to each child. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourse studies investigating differences in the socio-communicative profiles of autistic (ASD) and neurotypical (NT) individuals have mostly relied on orthographic transcriptions, without taking prosodic information into account. However, atypical prosody is ubiquitous in ASD and a more accurate representation of their discourse abilities should also include prosodic cues. This exploratory study addresses this gap by segmenting the spoken discourse of 12 ASD and NT adults using the framework of Basic Discourse Units (BDUs). BDUs result from the mapping of syntactic boundaries on prosodic units, which can coincide in different ways and are associated with different discourse strategies. We hypothesized that the discourse of ASD adults would display more atypical strategies than NT adults, reflecting a 'pedantic' style and more difficulties in managing ongoing discourse. While ASD adults did not produce more discourse units associated with didactic or pedantic strategies than NT adults, they did produce less units associated with strategies of interactional regulation. This study provides initial evidence that multidimensional linguistic units, such as BDUs can help differentiate speech delivery strategies of ASD adults from those of their NT peers, even based on simple prosodic cues like silent pauses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this article is to provide a balanced assessment of the significance autism has for the scientific study of language. While linguistic profiles in autism vary greatly, spanning from a total absence of functional language to verbal levels within the typical range, the entire autism spectrum is robustly characterized by lifelong disabilities in intersubjective communication and persistent difficulties in adopting the perspective of other people. In that sense, autism constitutes a unique profile in which linguistic competence is dissociated from communication skills. Somewhat paradoxically, autism is often mentioned to underscore the importance of mind reading for language use and of intersubjective communication for the emergence of language. Yet experimental studies on pragmatics in autism indicate that many pragmatic processes unfold without adopting one’s conversational partner’s perspective. Moreover, the patterns of language acquisition and learning in autism represent a strong challenge to the central role constructionist theories assign to socio-communicative skills. Data on autism thus force a reconsideration of the a priori conceptual boundaries on language learnability that shape the foundational debates between constructionist and nativist linguistic theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on potential linguistic research in the field of autism. Topics include associated with a higher probability not in developing language but growth of language skills in verbal autistic children; and cognition, maternal education, and response to joint attention correctly classifying over 80 percent of total cases of the highest and lowest language performers.

This study examined whether the atypical speech style that is frequently reported in autistic adults is underpinned by an inflexible production of phonetic targets. In a first task, 20 male autistic adults and 20 neuro‐typicals had to read and produce native vowels. To assess the extent to which phonetic inflexibility is due to an overall fine‐grained control of phonetic behavior or to a lack of flexibility in the realization of one's phonological repertoire, the second task asked participants to reproduce artificial vowel‐like sounds. Results confirmed the presence of a greater articulatory stability in the production of native vowels in autistic adults. When instructed to imitate artificial vowel‐like sounds, the autistic group did not better approximate the targets' acoustic properties relative to neuro‐typicals but their performance at reproducing artificial vowels was less variable and influenced to a greater extent by the articulatory properties of their own vocalic space. These findings suggest that the greater articulatory stability observed in autistic adults arises from a lack of flexibility in the production of their own native vowels. The two phonetic tasks are devoid of any pragmatic constraint, which indicates that phonetic inflexibility in autism is partly independent of register selection. Lay Summary: Autistic and neuro‐typical adults took part in two tasks: one in which they produced vowels from French, their native tongue, and the other where they imitated unfamiliar vowels. Autistic adults displayed significantly less variation in their production of different French vowels. In imitating unfamiliar vowels, they were more influenced by the way they pronounce French vowels. These results suggest that the atypical speech style, frequently attested in autistic individuals, could stem from an unusually stable pronunciation of speech sounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Face scanning studies in autistic children report mixed results as to attention allocated to the eyes and mouth regions. While face scanning is a dynamic process, the way autistic children distribute their attention between the eyes and mouth of their interlocutor is usually analyzed by averaging the proportion of time spent looking either on the eyes or the mouth over the whole duration of stimulus presentation. In this study, instead, we focused on the temporal distribution of visual attention between the eyes and mouth of adult faces in 58 autistic and 61 typically developing (TD) children. Participants' eye movements were recorded as they were freely watching videos of faces of silent and speaking adults. We explored attention to the eyes and mouth with fine-grained analyses of the temporal trajectory of fixations on the two regions using generalized additive mixed effects models. These analyses revealed that both groups started their observation of speaking faces on the eyes and shifted to the mouth as the actor started speaking. However, TD, but not autistic children then slowly shifted their attention back to the eyes. Rigorous analyses of how autistic children modulate their visual attention between key social features of the face over time may provide more accurate descriptions of their face scanning abilities. • Autistic children are usually reported to have overall reduced social attention. • We modeled the temporal distribution of fixations to the eyes and mouth using GAMM. • Social attention is marked by temporal differences in face scanning dynamics in ASD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have documented the significant presence of spontaneous and productive use of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in the speech of five Tunisian boys with autism, an unusual phenomenon. In typical development, MSA is not fully acquired before the late school years. The Arabic language in Tunisia is in a state of diglossia, and (unlike the colloquial Tunisian Arabic variety) MSA is virtually never used in everyday conversation. Television programs broadcast across the Arabic‐speaking world constitute the most important source of MSA for preschool children. Typically developing children require active social interaction to develop language, but some children with autism may use television and cartoons as noninteractional input to acquire language. This study highlighted the existence of a noninteractional language‐learning strategy that may partly compensate for the sociopragmatic deficits that characterize autism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We conducted a web-based study investigating whether the probability of deriving four types of pragmatic inferences depends on the degree to which one has traits associated with the autism spectrum, as measured by the autism spectrum quotient test (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Skinner, Martin, & Clubley, 2001). In line with previous research, we show that, independently of their autism spectrum quotient, participants are likely to derive those pragmatic inferences that can be derived by reasoning solely about alternatives that the speaker could have used. However, if the derivation of the pragmatic inference draws upon more complex counterfactual reasoning about what the speaker could have said, the probability that it is derived decreases significantly with one's autism quotient. We discuss the consequences for theories of pragmatics in autism and for linguistic theorizing in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language profiles in autism are variable and atypical, with frequent speech onset delays, but also, in some cases, unusually steep growth of structural language skills. Joint attention is often seen as a major predictor of language in autism, even though low joint attention is a core characteristic of autism, independent of language levels. In this systematic review of 71 studies, we ask whether, in autism, joint attention predicts advanced or only early language skills, and whether it may be independent of language outcomes. We consider only conservative estimates, and flag studies that include heterogenous samples or no control for non-verbal cognition. Our review suggests that joint attention plays a pivotal role for the emergence of language, but is also consistent with the idea that some autistic children may acquire language independently of joint attention skills. We propose that language in autism should not necessarily be modelled as a quantitative or chronological deviation from typical language development, and outline directions to bring autistic individuals' atypicality within the focus of scientific inquiry. • Our review clarifies the link between joint attention and language in autism. • Joint attention increases the probability for the language acquisition to take off. • Some autistic children acquire language despite low joint attention. • Non-socially mediated language in autism deserves to be further explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pragmatic deficits of persons with autism spectrum disorders [ASDs] are often traced back to a dysfunction in Theory of Mind. However, the exact nature of the link between pragmatics and mindreading in autism is unclear. Pragmatic deficits in ASDs are not homogenous: in particular, while inter-subjective dimensions are affected, some other pragmatic capacities seem to be relatively preserved. Moreover, failure on classical false-belief tasks stems from executive problems that go beyond belief attribution; false-belief tasks require taking an alternative perspective on the reality. While this capacity is functional in typically developing young children, it is impaired in ASDs. Typically developing children are capable of taking their interlocutor's perspective into account when communicating, whereas poor cognitive flexibility makes it difficult for persons with ASDs to grasp the inter-subjective character of communicative stimuli. This analysis predicts that those pragmatic processes that amount to merely taking into account salient contextual facts during utterance interpretation, without necessarily adopting the interlocutor's perspective, may be preserved in ASDs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The study examined first impressions of the speech of ASD and NT adults (Speakers) by other ASD and NT adults (Raters). • Raters evaluated Speakers using a Likert scale targeting first impressions of seven discourse features. • ASD and NT Raters both formed less favorable impressions of the spoken discourse of ASD Speakers. • There are specific linguistic features that distinguish the speech of ASD and NT adults. Studies on impression formation in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have suggested that both ASD and neurotypical (NT) individuals extract paralinguistic cues (e.g., vocal and facial expressions) from brief extracts of social behaviors to form less favorable impressions of the personality traits of ASD individuals than of their NT peers. Yet, discourse studies in ASD have also suggested that there are specific linguistic features (e.g., conjunctions) that can distinguish the speech of ASD individuals from that of NT individuals. This study investigates whether naïve participants with and without autism can perceive discourse features previously identified as characteristic of ASD speech, based on a single exposure to conversation extracts. A cross-design rating experiment was created whereby a group of ASD and NT adults (blind to diagnosis information) rated audio recordings involving ASD and NT speakers. Rating participants evaluated the recordings using a Likert scale targeting impressions of discourse features. ASD and NT Raters behaved similarly on the ratings of discourse features; evaluating the speech of ASD Speakers less favorably than those of NT Speakers. Our results extend previous findings by showing that linguistic cues also lead to less favorable impressions of the discourse of ASD Speakers, and this from both the perspective of NT and ASD Raters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Increasing attention is being paid to the higher prevalence of boys with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and to the implications of this ratio discrepancy on our understanding of autism in girls. One recent avenue of research has focused on caregiver's concern, suggesting that autism might present differently in boys and girls. One unexplored factor related to concerns on child development is whether socio-cultural factors such as gender-related expectations influence the evaluation of symptom severity and predictions about future behavioral development. Methods: The latter concerns were the focus of the present study and were explored by investigating laypeople's judgment of the severity of autism symptoms using an online parent role-playing paradigm, in which participants were asked to rate vignettes depicting the behaviors of a child in different everyday life scenarios. The child's gender and the severity of ASD symptoms were manipulated to examine the effect of gender on the perception of symptom severity. Results: Results suggest that there are no gender differences in perceived symptom severity and associated degree of concern for 5-year-old boys and girls but that there is a gender difference in perceived future atypicality at 15 years old, with boys being rated as more likely to be perceived as atypical by their peers at that age than girls. Conclusions: Investigating parent's cognition about their child's future behavioral development can provide additional information regarding delayed diagnosis of autistic girls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While narrative competence has been well documented in autistic children and young adolescents, fairly little is known about narrative performance of autistic adults. However, narrative abilities continue to develop well into adulthood. Hence, the main objective of the present study is to provide a clearer linguistic and communicative profile of ASD in adulthood by performing a systematic description of narrative performance in autistic adults. A specific annotation scheme was developed to code narrative production, in order to be able to compare the production of autistic participants to pairwise matched neurotypical adults relative to microstructure (syntactic complexity), macrostructure (overall story structure and cohesive ties) and internal state language of the corpus' narratives. The results suggest that autistic adults performed worse than their neurotypical peers on all three dimensions of narrative production, resulting in less coherent narratives overall for autistic adults. • Narrative production continues to be an area of difficulty for ASD adults. • Group differences emerged in all three main dimensions of narrative production. • ASD adults exploit linguistic features less efficiently to enhance their narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]