Verbal Entrainment and Correlated Neural Mechanisms in Autism Spectrum Disorder and First-Degree Relatives

Patel, Shivani

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-f102-9x59

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Verbal Entrainment and Correlated Neural Mechanisms in Autism Spectrum Disorder and First-Degree Relatives

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Difficulties in prosody (e.g., intonation, volume, rate), turn-taking, and overly formal speech constitute common social communication deficits in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which can significantly hinder social interactions (Paul et al., 2009). Subtle parallel differences in social communication have also been noted in parents of individuals with ASD, suggesting that these detectable differences may index underlying genetic liability to ASD (Landa et al., 1992). Therefore, further investigation of specific communication differences in parents of individuals with ASD may clarify the biological origins of differences in ASD. In typical development, social interactions are supported by the process of entrainment, or the unconscious tendency to become more similar to one’s communicative partner. Indeed, verbal entrainment is evidenced across a variety of domains including prosody, lexical, semantic, and syntactic areas of communication. However, objective characterization of how deficits in these areas impact broader social communication in ASD remains a challenge in research and clinical contexts. Therefore, the present study implemented a comprehensive, computational investigation of lexical, semantic, syntactic, and prosodic entrainment in individuals with ASD and their parents. Individuals with ASD (n = 23), their parents (n = 51), and respective control groups (n = 27 ASD controls; n = 31 parent controls) participated in a 10-minute interactive game with an examiner. The pair conversed with the goal of determining whether or not the silhouettes they were independently viewing matched. Lexical entrainment was based on lemmatized words, semantic entrainment on Word2Vec representations of the corpus, and syntactic entrainment on bigrams of part-of-speech-tags (Duran et al., 2019). Prosodic entrainment was measured using the contour-based, parametric, and superpositional intonation stylization toolkit (Reichel, 2011). Associations between verbal entrainment and measures of broader social communication abilities were assessed. Furthermore, relationships with cognitive and neural mechanisms thought to contribute to social communication atypicalities in ASD and speech and language development more broadly were investigated. Overall, results revealed strong evidence of deviant prosodic, lexical, and semantic entrainment in individuals with ASD, as well as prosodic and syntactic entrainment in their parents. Relationships were detected between entrainment and social cognitive abilities among individuals with ASD, and associations between entrainment and neural encoding of speech sounds emerged in all groups. Overlapping differences in prosodic entrainment and associations with neural encoding of speech in individuals with ASD and their parents underscore the influence of two important mechanisms contributing to noted social communication differences and provide compelling evidence for future investigation of the genetic basis of these differences. Furthermore, findings revealed strong associations between objective, computational measurements of entrainment and qualitative ratings of pragmatic language in individuals with ASD, highlighting the promise of such computational tools for use in future research and intervention studies.

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