Images and Imagination: Automated Analysis of Priming Effects Related to Autism Spectrum Disorder and Developmental Language Disorder (2020)

Abstract: Different aspects of language processing have been shown to be sensitive to priming but the findings of studies examining priming effects in adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) have been inconclusive. We present a study analysing visual and implicit semantic priming in adolescents with ASD and DLD. Based on a dataset of fictional and script-like narratives, we evaluate how often and how extensively, content of two different priming sources is used by the participants. The first priming source was visual, consisting of images shown to the participants to assist them with their storytelling. The second priming source originated from commonsense knowledge, using crowdsourced data containing prototypical script elements. Our results show that individuals with ASD are less sensitive to both types of priming, but show typical usage of primed cues when they use them at all. In contrast, children with DLD show mostly average priming sensitivity, but exhibit an over-proportional use of the priming cues.

## introduction this study compares the effects of priming on the narratives of adolescents with autism spectrum disorder with those of adolescents with developmental language disorders foot_1 . priming occurs when exposure to one stimulus influences the response to a subsequent stimulus. this is an unconscious process whereby an association is activated in memory just before a new stimulus is seen or a task is introduced and is thought to play an important role in facilitating language fluency @xcite , implicit language learning @xcite , and in conversation and social interaction (e.g. @xcite . different aspects of language processing have been shown to be sensitive to priming @xcite but whilst studies have typically examined priming effects in children @xcite , there is a paucity of literature comparing priming effects in adolescents with asd with those of adolescents with dld. both asd and dld are communication disorders, with individuals in these clinical groups often having overlapping language phenotypes @xcite . however, it is unclear whether or not the language difficulties they exhibit have the same or different underlying aetiology @xcite . asd is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterised by impairments in social interaction, verbal and nonverbal communication and restricted and repetitive behaviours @xcite . dlds affect about 7.5% of children during their first year of school @xcite , and are associated with different language difficulties (e.g phonology, semantics and syntax). these impairments can be receptive, expressive or mixed @xcite and are likely to persist into adolescence and young adulthood @xcite . research has shown that both individuals with asd and those with dld produce narratives that are impoverished in comparison to their typically developing peers, displaying difficulties in both macrostructure and microstructure @xcite @xcite . studies comparing narratives of children from these two clinical groups have found few differences in structural language, evaluation and pragmatic measures @xcite @xcite . as yet, it is not clear if this is because both groups have the same underlying language difficulties, or if there are diagnostic specific factors affecting their narrative production. narrative difficulties of individuals with asd may be explained, in part, by the information processing theory of weak central coherence. this theory proposes that something within the typical cognitive system derives meaning by relating incoming information to global context @xcite . frith argued that individuals with asd display differences to neurotypicals in this aspect of information processing, resulting in a tendency to focus on details at the expense of the whole. it is possible that the ability to make use of context to infer meaning is related to priming effects in language. if this is so, then we would expect individuals with asd to display differences in priming compared to both their typically developing peers and the dld group which would be reflected in their narrative language. there is clearly a need for further research in this area and, to date, we can find none that compares priming effects in individuals with an asd or dld. we believe this to be an important area to explore for a number of reasons. a better understanding of the specific areas of difficulty experienced by both these clinical groups in not only structural, but also other forms of priming would inform the planning of appropriate intervention and support. furthermore, if differences in priming are found between the two groups, this may give some indication as to whether or not the language difficulties they exhibit arise from the same or different underlying aetiology. moreover, if individuals with asd, but not those with dld, display difficulties in priming, this may offer support for the theory of weak central coherence as an explanation for autism. in this study, our aim was to investigate priming effects in language production at the discourse level in adolescents with these communication disorders. in order to do so, we analysed visual and script based priming cues, and the extent to which these types of context present difficulties for individuals with asd or dld. a further aim was to examine whether these effects are related to language competency and development, or originated from typical traits of individuals with asd. this paper is structured as follows: after a review of related work (sec. 2), we describe the dataset (sec. 3) underlying our experiments (sec. 4). after a discussion of the results (sec. 5) we conclude with a short summary and suggestions for future research (sec. 6). ## related work to date, research into priming effects on the language of individuals with either asd or dld, has primarily focused on structural or syntactic priming. the findings are inconclusive, but suggest that both these groups exhibit less ability to benefit from priming cues than typically developing children @xcite . @xcite have shown that individuals with asd benefit more from phonological cues than semantic cues. evidence from fmri scans also suggests that the performance of individuals may depend on perceptual rather than semantic processing @xcite . @xcite showed that for children with asd, priming cues are rarely sufficient to change previously triggered meanings of homographs. studies of priming in individuals with dld are similarly inconclusive. @xcite found that children with dld displayed similar syntactic priming effects as typically developing children. however, another study using a structural priming paradigm @xcite suggests that children with dld show a smaller cumulative priming effect. @xcite later concluded that children with dld exhibit patterns of syntactic priming effects which are consistent with an impairment in implicit learning mechanisms. in this experiment, none of the groups showed a significant cumulative priming effect. our investigation of priming effects required suitable raw data together with either extensive manual annotation or adequate computational methods. we decided to apply methods from the field of computational stylometry, which is concerned with the analysis of (written or transcribed) text and how it reveals information about the person who has produced this @xcite . for dld, there are virtually no approaches to automated analyses: @xcite detected language impairment in spanish texts, with a focus on the classification task itself rather than on stylometric analyses of explaining features. there are, however, some studies where language difficulties typical in asd have been subject to automated analysis. most approaches have tried to automatically classify texts by individuals with asd: @xcite built an auto-mated classifier for sentences uttered by very young children (6-7 years old), distinguishing between an asd group and two comparison groups (one with children with a language impairment, one with typically developing children). the authors themselves note some drawbacks of their underlying dataset, in particular that some children in the asd group were also classified as language-impaired. consequently, it was not possible to demonstrate a clear distinction between the groups. in two follow-up studies @xcite , the authors analysed whole narratives (retellings) of children (mean age 6.4) with asd compared to a typically developing comparison group. the texts from the comparison group and some crowdsourced retellings from typically developing adults served as a basis for determining unusualness. we adopted parts of this idea and, in our study, collected data via crowdsourcing and matched it to the narratives under research. in our case, the collected data does not consist of whole narratives, but rather abstract prototypical facts. beyond the classification approaches, de bruyne et al. (2018) present a detailed feature analysis of dutch texts by adolescents with asd, identifying shallow and deep features that indicate asdrelated difficulties. our own work @xcite also reports different shallow and discourse-based analyses of stories by children with asd, compared to two control groups. we have used the same data source and have taken these analyses a step further. moving beyond textbased analyses, we have targeted contextual priming effects. in addition to examining language typical for asd, we have extended the dataset and also evaluated texts by adolescents with dld. ## datasets our analysis was based on datasets by @xcite and by @xcite . the corpus contains transcripts of two types of stories: fictional stories and stories we call event narratives which describe common scenarios. following is a description of the participant groups, the two story types and a short summary of the whole corpus. ## priming experiments we examined scripts and images as two different priming sources, and analysed the influence of these different contextual cues in narrations by adolescents with asd, dld and neurotypical developing peers. we thus distinguished the priming mechanisms that reflect the developmental stage of language competency (by comparing the languagematched group with the asd group), fundamental differences in language development (comparing the dld group with the other groups) or typical traits of individuals with asd. we will first present our definition of priming and the goals of our experiments (4.1). after describing how we crowdsourced textual representations of the different priming stimuli (4.2) and which measures we used to relate them to the narratives (4.3), we outline the results (4.4) ## results and discussion in this section, we interpret our results and review to what extent they answer open questions about priming in adolescents with asd and with dld. ## conclusion we conclude this paper with a short summary and some suggestions for future work.