Strategic Deception in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder

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

Cross-cultural variation in experiences of acceptance, camouflaging and mental health difficulties in autism:A registered report

Recent findings suggest that stigma and camouflaging contribute to mental health difficulties for autistic individuals, however, this evidence is largely based on UK samples. While studies have shown cross-cultural differences in levels of autism-related stigma, it is unclear whether camouflaging and mental health difficulties vary across cultures. Hence, the current study had two aims: (1) to determine whether significant relationships between autism acceptance, camouflaging, and mental health difficulties replicate in a cross-cultural sample of autistic adults, and (2) to compare these variables across cultures. To fulfil these aims, 306 autistic adults from eight countries (Australia, Belgium, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States) completed a series of online questionnaires. We found that external acceptance and personal acceptance were associated with lower levels of depression but not camouflaging or stress. Higher camouflaging was associated with elevated levels of depression, anxiety, and stress. Significant differences were found across countries in external acceptance, personal acceptance, depression, anxiety, and stress, even after controlling for relevant covariates. Levels of camouflaging also differed across countries however this effect became non-significant after controlling for the covariates. These findings have significant implications, identifying priority regions for anti-stigma interventions, and highlighting countries where greater support for mental health difficulties is needed

Struggling with alternative descriptions: Impaired referential processing in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Background: Children and adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) show a tendency to preferentially rely on those referential descriptions that have previously been used by their conversational partner. However, such a tendency may become maladaptive in a situation of interaction with different partners who may introduce alternative lexical descriptions for the same referent. Methods: Six-year-old children with ASD, as well as mental- and verbal-age-matched typically developing (TD) children moved items on a touch-screen following instructions by an experimenter. During the entrainment phase, the experimenter introduced lexical descriptions for all the items. Then, either the original experimenter or a new partner, depending on the condition, used alternative descriptions for some items and kept the same descriptions for others. Accuracy and time to locate items were collected. Results: Relative to TD children, children with ASD had more difficulty in recognizing and interpreting referential descriptions when another description has been previously used. Whether a new description was introduced by a new or the original experimenter had no effect in any group. Conclusion: Referential processing in ASD is compromised by impaired ability to confront alternative conceptual perspectives. A potential executive source for these difficulties is discussed

Discourse coherence and atypicality in autistic adults : from corpus analysis to subjective impressions of spoken discourse

Adequate and efficient participation in a social interaction requires the ability to produce and interpret coherent discourse. Coherence can be achieved using a diverse set of cognitive and linguistic tools such as topic continuity or connectives. Failing to produce enough coherence cues or to interpret them as such can lead to communication breakdowns, potentially compromising the on-going interaction. In a neurodevelopmental disorder like autism, characterized by impairments in social communication, autistic individuals often fail to produce and understand coherent discourse. Numerous studies have already used discourse analysis to examine discourse (in)coherence and (a)typicality in autistic individuals. However, the studies have been one-sided in terms of methodology, viz. investigating either discourse production or comprehension, but not both. They have also been one-sided in terms of the perspective of the analysis, viz. only considering discourse coherence from the standpoint of neurotypical individuals, without also considering the perspective of autistic individuals. However, social communication is a two-sided dynamic, whereby both communication partners contribute to the coherence of the unfolding discourse. Therefore, the aim of this dissertation is to define the qualities of discourse (in)coherence and (a)typicality in autistic adults by combining both detailed transcript analyses and more subjective interpretation of spoken discourse, by both neurotypical and autistic individuals. To achieve these aims, a corpus of interviews of French-speaking autistic adults and French-speaking neurotypical adults, matched on gender, age and IQ was collected. The data of three interview tasks was annotated and underlie the entire work of this dissertation. On the basis of the annotated data, detailed transcript analyses were performed to examine both the content and the delivery strategies of spoken discourse in autism. In a subsequent step, discourse features identified in transcripts are related with their perception by naïve listeners with and without a diagnosis of autism as well as their contribution to impression formation of the speaker. Taken together, this dissertation shows a consistent difficulty in the production of coherent discourse which transpired both in content and delivery strategy. Crucially, reduced discourse coherence resulted in a one-sided ‘neurotypical’ bias towards autistic individuals, which is likely to further hinder their communication success.Arts, Faculty ofEnglish, Department ofGraduat

Greater articulatory stability in the speech of adults with ASD: acoustic evidence

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A linguistic analysis of autistic and non autistic women's productions: written narratives of emotional autobiographical memories

[Background] Narrative research has been identified as a great tool in linguistic studies, as it ecologically reveals qualitative and quantitative differences in individuals experiencing communicative difficulties - but who still show good structural language skills (Geelhand et al. 2020; Manolitsi & Botting, 2011). Narrative research within the autistic population has until now included predominantly male samples, but it is now argued that the communicative profile of autistic women might differ from men’s (Sturrock et al. 2020). However, the nature of these differences is still poorly understood. Moreover, most narrative studies rely on oral tasks, although autistic adults tend to prefer written or computer-mediated communication(Gillespie-Lynch et al. 2020). [Objectives] This study aims at offering a better perspective on the specific linguistic challenges that autistic women face compared to non-autistic (NA) women, through a semi-structured task that resembles every-day narrative situations (i.e. memories storytelling). [Methods] Participants were 15 autistic and 15 non-autistic (NA) cisgender women, pairwise matched on age (M(age)= 34.73). As the study took place during the lockdown, recruitment and testing were done online and in writing. Participants were asked to write 4 autobiographical memories, based on 4 emotional cue words. No time limit was given, but a minimum and maximum number of characters were allowed for each narrative (1000-1800). [Results] Group differences were found in all aspects of the analysis, the first being the microstructure: autistic women wrote longer narratives, used more unique and infrequent words, and showed greater productivity than NA women. On the macrostructure level, autistic women showed reduced use of explicit causal connectives. As for the internal state language, autistic women used less cognitive state terms but slightly more perceptual terms. [Conclusions] Microstructure results seem in line with those observed in written studies that previously included mostly men (Brown et al. 2014; Price et al. 2020), which could indicate a specific microstructural profile of autistic adults in writing. Autistic women however wrote longer narratives and used more perceptual terms than NA women, which shows unique traits that were not identified in predominantly men samples (Finnegan & Accardo, 2018).Macrostructure and internal state language measures seem to corroborate results observedin oral studies (Geelhand et al. 2020), indicating common challenges of narrative expression for autistic adults, in both writing and speaking. This indicates that although the atypical features of autistic women’s communication may be more discrete than those of autistic men (Sturrock et al. 2020) they are still not comparable to NA women, suggesting that autistic women still experience challenges that may be harder to perceive. This exploratory study led to the preparation of a bigger research project investigating both the influence of gender (in a non-binary approach) and medium of communication (oral or written), which methodology we will discuss during the poster session, in relation with the results presented here.info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublishe

Autistic and non-autistic women's written narratives of emotional autobiographical memories: a linguistic analysis

info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublishe

Investigating the effect of neurotype-matching on communication efficiency and first impressions of verbal interactions

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Brief Report: Acoustic Evidence for Increased Articulatory Stability in the Speech of Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder

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.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

A linguistic analysis of autistic and non-autistic adult women’s productions: written narratives of emotional autobiographical memories

Narrative research has been identified as a great tool in linguistic studies, as it ecologically reveals qualitative and quantitative differences in individuals experiencing communicative difficulties - but who still show good structural language skills (Geelhand et al. 2020; Manolitsi & Botting, 2011). Narrative research within the autistic population has until now included predominantly male samples, but it is now argued that the communicative profile of autistic women might differ from men’s (Sturrock et al. 2020). However, the nature of this ambiguous profile of autistic women is still poorly understood. Moreover, most narrative studies rely on oral tasks; given that autistic adults tend to prefer written or computer-mediated communication (Gillespie-Lynch et al. 2020), it is surprising that the written communication of autistic adults hasn’t been thoroughly investigated yet. Therefore, this study aims at offering a better perspective on the specific linguistic challenges that autistic women face compared to non-autistic (NA) women, through a semi-structured task that resemble every-day narrative situations (i.e. memories storytelling). Participants were 15 autistic and 15 non-autistic (NA) cisgender women, pairwise matched on age (M(age)= 34.73). As the study took place during the lockdown, recruitment and testing were done online and in writing. Participants were asked to write 4 autobiographical memories, based on 4 emotional cue words. No time limit was given, but a minimum and maximum number of characters were allowed for each narrative (1000-1800). Groups differences were found in all aspects of the analysis, the first being the microstructure: autistic women wrote longer narratives, used more unique and infrequent and showed greater productivity than NA women. On the macrostructure level, autistic women showed reduced use of explicit causal connectives. As for the internal state language, autistic women used less cognitive state terms but slightly more perceptual terms. Microstructure results seem in line with those observed in written studies that previously included mostly men (Brown et al. 2014; Price et al. 2020), which could indicate a specific microstructural profile of autistic adults in writing. Autistic women however wrote longer narratives and used more perceptual terms than NA women, which shows unique traits that were not identified in predominantly men samples (Finnegan & Accardo, 2018). Macrostructure and internal state language measures seems to corroborate results observed in oral studies (Geelhand et al. 2020), indicating common challenges of narrative expression for autistic adults, in both writing and speaking. This indicates that although the atypical features of autistic women’s communication may be more discrete than those of autistic men’s (Sturrock et al. 2020), they are still not comparable to NA women and therefore still experience challenges that may be harder to perceive. This exploratory study led to the preparation of a bigger research project investigating both the influence of gender (in a non-binary approach) and medium of communication (oral or written), which methodology we hope to discuss during the poster session, in relation with the results presented here.info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublishe