Lexical Alignment and Communicative Success During Social Problem Solving in ASD

Typical speakers tend to adopt words used by their conversational partners. This “lexical alignment” enhances communication by reducing ambiguity and promoting a shared understanding of the topic under discussion (Reitter & Moore, 2014). Pragmatic language impairments are central to autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but lexical alignment has been little studied to date; further, it has been studied primarily via structured laboratory tasks that may overestimate performance (Branigan et al, 2016). The current study utilized a task eliciting extended spontaneous discourse to explore lexical alignment and its associations with task performance in a sample of 29 adolescents with and without ASD. We hypothesized that ASD group would exhibit reduced lexical alignment during social communication, and explored associations among lexical alignment, task performance, executive function, Verbal IQ, and ASD symptom severity. Results indicated that adolescents with ASD had greater difficulty describing navigational routes to a study-naïve RA, yielding paths that were less accurate. Alignment was reduced in participants with ASD, and was associated with path accuracy for TD, but not ASD, adolescents. Alignment was significantly associated with parent-report measures of executive function and SCQ scores. These findings raise the possibility that interventions that promote the use of shared vocabulary may support better communication.