Running Head: AUTISM IN CONVERSATION 1 Autism in Conversation: Psycholinguistic Analysis of Dyadic Conversations of Children on the Autism Spectrum Senior Honors Thesis

Despite the fact that individuals on the autism spectrum are perceived as awkward and lacking in social skills by typically developing (TD) peers, actual conversational difficulty in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is less monolithic than previously thought. High functioning children with autism (HFA) have comparative success implementing syntactic and phonological rules, but unlike their TD peers struggle mostly with pragmatics (Baron-Cohen 1999). For example, in an interview setting, a child with ASD may struggle to generate utterances that involve both themselves and their interviewee such as, “I used to live in Boston too, but now I live in New York. Have you ever been to New York? ” This study seeks to answer the following research questions: In conversation, are ASD kids responding to questions and generating them at a similar rate to TD peers? How appropriate are questions and responses between groups? How does the content of the responses and generated questions affect the conversation? Who speaks the most during an interview? Is it the interviewer (the child), or the interviewee? Consistent with my hypothesis, autistic children generated more information in their conversations, and spoke longer than typically developing peers. These results indicate that autistic children are attempting engagement in conversation, but that engagement is perceived as egocentric, and irrelevant, which can lead to bullying and further limits socio-linguistic skills. AUTISM IN CONVERSATION 3 Autism in Conversation: Psycholinguistic Analysis of Dyadic Conversations of Children on the Spectrum Studying Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has been of high interest within the field of developmental psychology as diagnosis of the disorder has greatly increased in the United States over the past few years (CDC, 2017). As it is defined by the DSM-5, Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a developmental and neurological disorder that affects social participation, effective communication, restrictive and repetitive behaviors or interests, and persistent deficits in social communication. Communication deficits are often difficulties with turn-taking behaviors, following ‘the rules of conversation’, that typically developing children (TD) acquire through typical language development (Daubert, 2014). Frequently language difficulties coincide with social isolation from peers. Social isolation by peers can lead to self-inflicted isolation, preventing further language development that would have occurred with social interaction and conversation (Boucher, 1984). Children on the spectrum continuously struggle with understanding facial cues and often are judged for responses that may not be considered appropriate, polite, or focusing on narrow and restrictive story-telling (Dean et al.,, 2013). Although there are deficits in both receptive and productive language, this study will focus on productive language. Language development and social competence have an intricately connected relationship. Children, particularly pre-teens and adolescents, need to develop meta-linguistic competence in order to determine the intent and meaning behind new expressions, and to clarify any linguistic ambiguity (Adibi, 2010). Pragmatic success shares a connection with understanding the mental state of the conversation partner, which can be facilitated through the ability to attribute mental states, beliefs and desires to another person, or Theory of Mind (Surian, 1996). Theory of Mind AUTISM IN CONVERSATION 4 is the ability to attribute desires, mental states, or thoughts to another person, and understanding others have differing mental states than themselves, and in the case of dyadic interviews, Theory of Mind is tested by understanding that “there may be a difference between a speaker’s knowledge state and that of the listener” (Baron-Cohen, 1999, p. 408). Autistic children have deficits in Theory of Mind compared to their typically developing peers (Surian, 1996). Despite showing relatively intact knowledge of syntax and morphology, most higher functioning children on the autism spectrum, those without intellectual disability, struggle in their pragmatic language capacity (Surian, 1996). Pragmatics is the study of how language obtains meaning aside from literal meaning through context (Birner, 2012). Children on the autism spectrum often struggle with the cognitive task of deriving meaning from context (Surian, 1996). Within the field of pragmatics, there are several theories as to how we derive meaning from language. Grice suggested there are specific ‘Maxims’ of conversation that all speakers attempt to follow in a conversation: avoid redundancy, lying, impoliteness, and to be as informative as is possible and necessary (as reviewed in Surian, 1996). When tested for their ability to detect pragmatic errors in conversations, autistic children perform more poorly than their typically developing peers. Surian (1996) suggests that autistic children are ‘deaf’ to Gricean Maxims, which are suggested to be universal at least among native English speakers. Presumably, in conversation all speakers operate under Brown and Levinson’s ‘Politeness Theory’, which claims that “politeness and the recognition and linguistic acknowledgement of much subtler threats to the self-image that a person presents publicly” (Birner, 2012 p. 201). According to Birner, within a discourse, the speaker considers the context in which they are speaking in order to present a certain self-image, and they also actively seek to AUTISM IN CONVERSATION 5 maintain the self-image that is most appropriate in that context. However, ‘threats to self-image’ are subject to the speaker’s discretion and interpretation. In other words, the speaker is the one who makes choices in order to follow the ‘Politeness Principle’, but those choices are made on their own interpretation of the need for specific speech acts within a conversation. Therefore, an explanation for the supposed errors in productive speech for children on the autism spectrum such as interrupting, not taking turns in a conversation, or asking inappropriate questions (Surien 1996), can be explained within the parameters of the Politeness Principle as the speaker not perceiving the needs of the hearer or of the conversation at large. Autistic children also tend to prioritize conversations with adults over conversations with peers, which further limits their metalinguistic understanding of context and the importance of considering the hearer when generating utterances. (Dean et al., 2013). These difficulties in pragmatic understanding can lead to serious misunderstandings and group isolation for autistic children, which in turn threatens further learning and development of meta-linguistic competence (Adibi, 2010). Although autistic children have difficulty with pragmatic understanding, there is evidence in the literature that autistic children are capable of learning this information through intervention and practice. Despite some children on the spectrum possessing narrow interests and focuses of attention, turn-taking and other conversational strategies can be ‘trained’ with successful intervention (Daubert, 2014). This training was based on a motivation rewards system based on cards, where a child received a card with a favorite character of the child’s (Daubert 2014). Considering that pragmatics is the use of language within a specified context, it is imperative to look at naturally occurring speech, in order to find evidence for pragmatic