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Altered Gesture and Speech Production in ASD Detract from In-Person Communicative Quality

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Abstract

This study disentangled the influences of language and social processing on communication in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) by examining whether gesture and speech production differs as a function of social context. The results indicate that, unlike other adolescents, adolescents with ASD did not increase their coherency and engagement in the presence of a visible listener, and that greater coherency and engagement were related to lesser social and communicative impairments. Additionally, the results indicated that adolescents with ASD produced sparser speech and fewer gestures conveying supplementary information, and that both of these effects increased in the presence of a visible listener. Together, these findings suggest that interpersonal communication deficits in ASD are driven more strongly by social processing than language processing.

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Notes

  1. Lexical affiliates were identified for all gesture types (iconic, metaphorical, beat, deictic), which reduced interrater agreement compared to other similar studies (e.g., de Marchena and Eigsti 2010) where not all gesture types were scored.

  2. This value was lower than others because there were unlimited possibilities, rather than a fixed scale or alternatives to choose between. In order to be scored as in agreement, both coders’ response were required to be identical.

  3. Text analysis measures were used as a metric of speech complexity because there are no comparable automated measures specifically designed for speech analysis.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by an institutional training fellowship “Training in Transformative Discovery in Psychiatry” (MH016804-31; Robert A. Sweet, PI) to L.M.M. and a NARSAD Young Investigator Award from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation to A.S.G. It was done at the University of Pittsburgh, supported by NIMH K01MH081191 (PI: O’Hearn), and NIH HD055748 (PI: Minshew) from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The authors thank Andrew S. Lynn for assistance with data collection and Ashlie Caputo and Marco Pilotta for assistance with data coding, as well as the participants and their families.

Author Contributions

L.M.M., K.O'H., B.L., & A.S.G. designed research; L.M.M. and K. O'H. performed research; L.M.M. and A.S.G. analyzed data; L.M.M. & A.S.G. wrote the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh, S906 Scaife Hall, 3550 Terrace St., Pittsburgh, PA, 15261, USA

    Laura M. Morett, Kirsten O’Hearn, Beatriz Luna & Avniel Singh Ghuman

  2. Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Laura M. Morett, Beatriz Luna & Avniel Singh Ghuman

  3. Department of Neurosurgery, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Avniel Singh Ghuman

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  1. Laura M. Morett
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Correspondence to Laura M. Morett.

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Morett, L.M., O’Hearn, K., Luna, B. et al. Altered Gesture and Speech Production in ASD Detract from In-Person Communicative Quality. J Autism Dev Disord 46, 998–1012 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-015-2645-9

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