Autistic children’s language imitation shows reduced sensitivity to ostracism

Zoë L. Hopkins； Nicola Yuill；Holly P. Branigan

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 an ostracism 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.

在对话中，说话者倾向于模仿或配合对方的语言选择。较高程度的一致有助于交流，并可由从属目标激发。由于自闭症儿童有互动和交流障碍，我们研究了未能表现出附属语言模仿是否会导致他们的对话困难。我们测量了自闭症儿童与伙伴的词汇一致性，并采用了一种会诱发典型成人和儿童从属动机的排斥操作。虽然自闭症儿童表现出了词汇一致性，但与对照组相比，我们没有观察到从属关系对被排斥儿童的一致性倾向产生影响。我们的研究结果表明，自闭症儿童无法增加语言模仿–一种潜在的有价值的社会适应形式，这可能反映出他们的情感理解能力受损。