Language Lunch: Dr. Aparna Nadig
The CRLMB Language Lunch is an informal, academic-community seminar on speech and language research. Please join us at noon on November 10th as Aparna Nadig, (Ph.D) School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, 海角社区, presents "Interpersonal communication in high-functioning autism: Looking beyond group differences."
Abstract:
In this talk I describe a set of studies on communication in school-age children with high-functioning autism that focus on individual differences within this group and the factors that underlie them. The first study examined how participants describe objects to a conversational partner in three situations with increasingly complex audience design demands. Rather than a general attenuation in adapted descriptions, HFA participants demonstrated distinct adaptation profiles where more complex aspects of audience design were demonstrated sequentially. Higher structural language ability, rather than symptom severity or social skills, differentiated HFA participants with typical adaptation profiles from those who displayed decreased audience design.
The second set of studies examined face-to-face conversation in the same sample. A quantitative analysis was carried out on both verbal exchange and gaze data. In addition a novel question was examined: How does speaking about a circumscribed interest affect reciprocity of verbal exchange and eye gaze, relative to a generic topic? Speaking about a topic of interest may improve reciprocity by increasing participants' motivation. Alternatively, it could engender more one-sided interaction, given the engrossing nature of circumscribed interests. In their verbal exchanges HFA participants demonstrated decreased reciprocity during the interest topic. Moreover, stereotyped behaviour and restricted interest symptoms were inversely related to reciprocal verbal exchange. However, both the HFA and comparison groups looked significantly more to their partner's face during the interest than generic topic. The results across modalities suggest that circumscribed interests led HFA participants to be less adaptive to their partner verbally, but speaking about these highly practiced topics also allowed for increased gaze to the partner.
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