The literature on alignment in ASD is very small, and shows the opposite trend of the wider alignment literature, in so far as there has been greater focus on children than on adults. Studies have considered syntactic (Allen et al., 2011) and lexical (Osborne & Allen, 2012) alignment in ASD children, and Article 1 (Hopkins, Yuill, & Keller, 2015) of this thesis contributes to the same line of enquiry; Slocombe et al. (2012) have examined alignment of syntax, lexis, and spatial frame of reference in AS adults. These studies are considered in more detail below (5.1).
ASD provides an interesting test case for theories of alignment, because several of the impairments associated with the disorder (cf., 2.5) could potentially impact upon the different mechanisms believed to be implicated in the alignment process; this has been the starting point for studies of alignment in ASD, which have hypothesised that ASD individuals show disrupted patterns of alignment in ways that can explain some of their conversational deficits, as outlined in 3.1. For example, given that ASD individuals commonly have imitative deficits, researchers (e.g., Allen et al., 2011) have questioned whether and to what extent the priming mechanisms for alignment are intact in ASD. Other researchers (Osborne & Allen, 2012; Slocombe et al., 2012) have considered whether ASD individuals’ social cognitive deficits (e.g., impaired ToM) could affect alignment on levels of language where audience design mechanisms have been shown to influence
language imitation (i.e., lexis) in the typical population. To date, there have been no investigations into whether affective impairments influence ASD individuals’ alignment.
5.1. Past research on alignment in ASD
Universally, previous studies of alignment in ASD have been based on psycholinguistic experimentation, rather than corpus data. Further, the ASD participants in these studies are reported as having language skills within the broadly normal range; this is perhaps a reflection of the linguistic abilities required to both understand and engage with the alignment paradigms.
Allen et al., (2011) matched a group of ASD children to two groups of control children, matched for (1) chronological and (2) VM age, and examined the extent to which ASD children aligned syntax with an interlocutor. Syntactic alignment was measured using a variant of the picture description task described in 4.6.; this was a syntactic priming paradigm embedded in the children’s card game Snap!, Allen et al., (2011) demonstrated that, first, ASD children had intact alignment, and were more likely to describe a picture card using a passive (dispreferred) structure after hearing their interlocutor use a passive structure to describe another, semantically unrelated picture. Secondly, Allen et al. (2011) reported that ASD children were as likely to align syntax with an interlocutor as were TD children of either the same chronological or same VM age, suggesting that ASD children’s conversational difficulties do not stem from a general deficit in linguistic imitation.
Building on the finding that syntactic alignment is intact in ASD, Osborne and Allen (2012) examined whether ASD children also demonstrate lexical alignment. Further, they investigated whether ASD children’s lexical alignment reflected audience design considerations, as it does in the typical population (Branigan et al., 2011). Lexical alignment was measured using a version of the Snap! game employed in Allen et al.’s (2011) study, and ASD children’s alignment effects were again compared to those of control groups
matched either for chronological or for VM age. Children’s performance on the Mind in the Eyes test (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Spong, Scahill, & Lawson, 2001), a ToM task which measures emotion processing, provided a proxy measure for their capacity for audience design. Consistent with Allen et al.’s (2011) findings, Osborne and Allen (2012) demonstrated that lexical alignment was intact, but found no relationship between ToM abilities and alignment in any of the groups. They interpreted this as evidence that lexical alignment is unmediated in ASD and TD children.
Slocombe et al.’s (2012) study of AS adults supports and extends the findings of Allen et al. (2011) and Osborne and Allen (2012). The AS group was compared with a group of typical adults on two co-operative tasks: one task was based on Branigan et al.’s (2000b) card sorting task, and was used to measure syntactic alignment; lexical alignment was measured on a novel puzzle solving task, in which participants arranged cards depicting single objects on a grid. The navigational element of this puzzle allowed the researchers to measure alignment on spatial frames of reference as well. Like the ASD children in Allen et al. (2011) and Osborne and Allen’s (2012) studies, AS adults aligned syntax and lexis with an interlocutor, and to the same extent as typical controls. Moreover, both AS and typical adults aligned on an interlocutor’s egocentric frame of reference, suggesting that they distinguished between their own and their interlocutor’s perspective during referential processing; this finding hints at the operation of audience design mechanisms in participants’ alignment.
5.2. Limitations of past research on alignment in ASD
Overall, the limited studies that exist suggest that alignment is intact in ASD, and that both ASD children and adults converge linguistically with an interlocutor to the same extent as their typical counterparts (Allen et al., 2011; Osborne & Allen, 2012; Slocombe et
al., 2012). Nevertheless, and mostly owing to a paucity of relevant literature, there are many outstanding questions about alignment in ASD.
An obvious question relates to unmediated accounts of alignment: if unmediated (priming) mechanisms are intact in ASD, why then do ASD individuals not find conversation ‘easy’, as it is assumed to be (Garrod & Pickering, 2004)? It is also a challenge to reconcile aspects of the IA account with the findings of the broader literature about conversation in ASD. As Slocombe et al. (2012) have pointed out, ASD individuals’ failure to tailor communication to the informational needs of their listener implies a failure to align on situational models, suggesting that the percolatory effect of alignment is neither smooth nor automatic in ASD. Allen et al. (2011) have suggested that the unmediated alignment process may be impeded by semantic language deficits in ASD, but the extent to which unmediated alignment promotes successful communication for ASD individuals, and ASD children in particular, is not known.
Another question unanswered by the literature concerns the mediated component of alignment in ASD. While previous research seems to rule out the possibility that audience design mechanisms drive ASD children’s lexical choices in conversation (Osborne & Allen, 2012), this matter deserves further investigation. One reason for this is that, with the exception of Osborne and Allen’s (2012) study, studies of alignment in ASD have not reported measures of ASD individuals’ mentalising abilities (e.g., ToM); this has made it difficult to draw any conclusions about whether and how far audience design considerations might influence alignment in ASD. Secondly, as discussed in 2.6.3, it may be necessary to take more elaborate measures of perspective-taking ability (Nilsen & Fecica, 2011), to gain a better understanding of the nature and role of audience mechanisms in ASD individuals’ alignment. It cannot be assumed that ASD and typical individuals align in the same way, simply because behavioural data suggests this is the case; it is important to determine whether the same mechanisms underpin alignment in ASD and typical
development, and whether these mechanisms contribute to the alignment process in a uniform way (Slocombe et al., 2012).
Lastly, and following the work of Gries (2005), Howes et al. (2010), and Healey et al. (2014), there is a question over whether the experimental findings about alignment in ASD may be generalised to real conversation. It has been observed that there is a discrepancy in ASD individuals’ social functioning, between experimental and natural tasks (Klin, Jones, Schultz, & Volkmar, 2003). This discrepancy also applies to ASD individuals’ performance in structured versus unstructured conversations (Tager-Flusberg & Anderson, 1991), which could also reconcile the findings that ASD individuals have intact alignment mechanisms, and yet struggle with conversation. Hence a third useful avenue of investigation is whether there is consistency between conversational data generated by psycholinguistic experimentation, and conversational data collected in a more naturalistic setting.
Respectively, these questions are taken up by Article 3 (‘Semantic alignment in children with autism spectrum disorder’), Article 2 (‘Mechanisms of mediated alignment in children with autism spectrum disorder’), and Article 1 (‘Children with autism spectrum disorder align syntax in natural conversation’) in this thesis.