J Autism Dev Disord
DOI 10.1007/s10803-012-1698-2
ORIGINAL PAPER
Linguistic Alignment in Adults with and Without Asperger’s
Syndrome
Katie E. Slocombe • Ivan Alvarez • Holly P. Branigan
Tjeerd Jellema • Hollie G. Burnett • Anja Fischer •
Yan Hei Li • Simon Garrod • Liat Levita
•
Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2012
Abstract Individuals with Asperger’s Syndrome (AS)
often have difficulties with social interactions and conversations. We investigated if these difficulties could be
attributable to a deficit in the ability to linguistically converge with an interlocutor, which is posited to be important
for successful communication. To that end, participants
completed two cooperative tasks with a confederate, which
allowed us to measure linguistic alignment with the confederate in terms of lexical choice, syntactic structure and
spatial frame of reference. There was no difference in the
performance of individuals with AS and matched controls
K. E. Slocombe (&) I. Alvarez A. Fischer Y. H. Li L. Levita
Department of Psychology, University of York,
York YO10 5DD, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
H. P. Branigan
Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, Dugald
Stewart Building, 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AD, UK
T. Jellema H. G. Burnett
Department of Psychology, University of Hull,
Hull HU6 7RX, UK
S. Garrod
Department of Psychology, University of Glasgow,
58 Hillhead Street, Glasgow G12 8QB, UK
Present Address:
A. Fischer
Institute for Neuroimmunology and Clinical MS Research,
Center for Molecular Neurobiology, Falkenried 94,
20251 Hamburg, Germany
Present Address:
L. Levita
Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield,
Sheffield S10 2TP, UK
and both groups showed significant alignment with the
confederate at all three levels. We conclude that linguistic
alignment is intact in adults with AS engaged in structured,
goal-directed social interactions.
Keywords Linguistic alignment Asperger’s Syndrome Autism spectrum disorder Social communication Conversation Dialogue
Introduction
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a pervasive developmental disorder, characterised by impairments in communication, social interaction and imagination, and by
restricted interests and rigid, repetitive behaviours (Rutter
1978; Klin et al. 2002). Within this spectrum, individuals
with Asperger’s Syndrome (AS) are characterised by
impairments in social interaction and the presence of
repetitive or stereotyped behaviours or interests, in the
absence of any history of delay in general cognitive
development or language acquisition (American Psychiatric Association 2000). However, although individuals with
AS appear to have comparable formal language skills to
typically developing (TD) individuals (Tager-Flusberg
et al. 2005), subtle but important, communication difficulties are evident in this population. Most of these difficulties relate to pragmatic skills needed for conversation,
such as tailoring communication to the listener’s needs and
engaging in reciprocal exchanges (Paul et al. 2009).
Indeed, individuals with AS often pursue a topic in too
much detail or for too long, seemingly insensitive to the listener’s interest, affective state or point of view (Paul et al.
2009; Attwood 1997). Conversely they can struggle to
maintain an ongoing discussion, through a failure to provide
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new, relevant information to extend the discussion, or through
the introduction of irrelevant comments and inappropriate
topic shifts (Paul et al. 2009). Individuals with AS can use
language that is overly formal (Paul et al. 2009) and be
pedantic about word choice (Ghaziuddin and Gerstein 1996).
Paul et al. 2009 also report individuals with AS were more
likely to be perceived as having aberrant intonation and
rhythm in their speech patterns. Whilst adults with AS have no
general deficits in narrative abilities, they demonstrate specific
pragmatic deficits when producing narratives (Colle et al.
2008). More specifically, adults with AS tended to use fewer
personal pronouns, temporal expressions and referential
expressions, thus often creating ambiguity for the listener and
overlooking their need for clarification about which event or
person the speaker is referring to. In summary, although few
deficits in formal linguistic skills are seen in individuals with
AS, their pragmatic use of language and particularly their
ability to engage appropriately in dialogue and conversation is
often impaired.
In contrast to individuals with AS, dialogue and conversation is easy for most TD individuals. Despite the potential
computational complexities of dialogue, most people find
dialogue much less demanding than monologue. Garrod and
Pickering (2004) have argued that it is linguistic alignment,
the act of convergence on linguistic behaviour between
interlocutors, which enables us to negotiate these potentially
complex interactions with relative ease. Through simultaneous alignment on different linguistic levels, from phonological to syntactical, interlocutors are able to converge on a
jointly built and understood situation model (i.e., a conceptual
representation of relevant aspects of the situation under discussion), without the need for explicit negotiation. Failure to
align at different linguistic levels may culminate in failure to
converge on a common situation model and thus result in
communication failures (Branigan et al. 2011). It seems
plausible, therefore, that a basic deficit in linguistic alignment
and consequent failure to establish a common situation model
with an interlocutor, could result in communication difficulties with dialogue and tailoring communication appropriately
to the listener that are commonly found in individuals with AS.
The importance of studying linguistic alignment in individuals with AS cannot therefore be underestimated. Most
fundamentally, investigating whether individuals with AS
suffer from such a deficit—and if so, whether it is pervasive
throughout their language use, or alternatively restricted to
some aspects of language—could lead to the identification of an
underlying cause of some of their communicative difficulties
and conversational problems in particular. Identification of
such a deficit could lead to educational/therapeutic interventions focussed on establishing alignment with conversational
partners. Additionally, such research could cast light on the
nature of the mechanisms that underlie linguistic alignment,
and the extent to which these may be intact in individuals with
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AS, leading to a better understanding of language processing in
dialogue in both TD and AS individuals.
Linguistic alignment refers to the process by which interlocutors converge with their conversational partner on a
number of different linguistic levels. TD interlocutors tend to
implicitly mimic aspects of each other’s speech production,
including phonetics (Pardo 2006), the rate of speech and
accent (Giles et al. 1992). Reports of aberrant rhythm and
intonation in the speech patterns of some individuals with AS
during conversation with others (e.g. Paul et al. 2009) may
indicate that this kind of mimicry does not occur in these
individuals. TD individuals also align on a lexical level,
choosing to use the same words and expressions as their
conversational partner (e.g. Brennan and Clark 1996). Again,
studies revealing pedantic and overly formal word choices by
individuals with AS (e.g. Ghaziuddin and Gerstein 1996)
indicate that these individuals may not engage in lexical
alignment. At more abstract levels, TD interlocutors tend to
use similar grammatical structures and thus align on a syntactic level (Branigan et al. 2000). For instance, after hearing a
confederate describe a scene using a prepositional object
structure (e.g. ‘a baker throws a cake to a waitress’), participants are more likely to describe unrelated scenes using the
same grammatical structure, despite no semantic similarity
between scenes. Finally, TD interlocutors often align on a
uniform frame of reference, for instance describing spatial
positions using the same scheme (Garrod and Anderson
1987). For example, descriptions of locations within a maze
converge between conversational partners until they are using
the same system (e.g. coordinates such as ‘A4’, or row/column
such as ‘third row, second column’). Further work has shown
interlocutors align to describe the location of objects in a scene
either with reference to the orientation of the observer or
another object in the scene (Watson et al. 2004; see also
Schober 1993). Thus, linguistic alignment can occur on several different levels, and in TD individuals occurs without
explicit negotiation and often without conscious awareness.
The occurrence of linguistic alignment at different levels is well established, but the mechanisms underlying this
behavioural convergence are less clear and may be multifaceted (Branigan et al. 2010). Alignment, particularly at
the level of syntactic structure, may be a product of
priming, where activation of previously processed linguistic information affects the production of subsequent
utterances. Activations of representations, such as lexical
items and grammatical structures, do not decay immediately but have a gradual offset, and therefore increase the
likelihood of the subsequent use of these representations
(e.g. Pickering and Branigan 1998). Linguistic priming is
an implicit/automatic process that is not affected by a
speaker’s beliefs about the interlocutor or by explicit
memories for particular utterances; indeed, amnesiacs can
display structural priming effects (Ferreira et al. 2008). An
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alternative explanation for linguistic alignment concerns
the active tailoring of language for the knowledge or
competence level of the conversational partner in order to
increase the chances of successful communication (e.g.
Clark 1996; Bortfeld and Brennan 1997). Such a ‘communicative design’ account has been considered particularly with respect to alignment on linguistic choices that
are associated with different ways of conceptualising an
object or situation, such as lexical choice. Consistent with
this account, speakers’ beliefs about their interlocutor’s
identity (e.g. computer vs. human; native vs. non-native
speaker) have been shown to strongly mediate their degree
of alignment for lexical choice (e.g. Branigan et al. 2011).
Other researchers have highlighted the important affective
consequences of linguistic alignment, where interlocutors
are more positively disposed to each other following
alignment (e.g. van Baaren et al. 2003). This mirrors
findings that mimicry of body posture and movements
results in more favourable ratings of an interlocutor
(Chartrand and Bargh 1999). Linguistic alignment may
thus be part of a more extensive system of imitation that is
vital for the creation of positive social cohesion between
individuals (Van Baaren et al. 2004) and may be used
strategically to enhance affiliative relationships with
interlocutors. Branigan et al. (2010) suggest that the
unmediated (linguistic priming) and mediated (audience
design and social affective) mechanisms that have been
hypothesised to underlie alignment are not mutually
exclusive and likely work in parallel, but with different
mechanisms contributing more or less strongly to alignment at different levels of structure and in different communicative contexts.
Based on the processes thought to underlie linguistic
alignment outlined above, individuals with AS may show
impairments in linguistic alignment, as a consequence of
the differences they have been reported to show in priming
(e.g. Kamio et al. 2007), imitation processes (e.g. Rogers
et al. 1996) and/or attribution of knowledge states to others
(Baron-Cohen 1995), compared to typically developing
individuals. For example, deficits in the imitation of gestures and pantomiming of actions have been reported in
both high and low functioning children and adolescents
with ASD (Rogers et al. 2003; Smith and Bryson 1994;
Rogers et al. 1996), and although controversial, some have
suggested that deficits in the mirror neuron system (di
Pellegrino et al. 1992) may be responsible for this (Williams et al. 2001). In addition, individuals with AS may
have deficits in linguistic alignment as a consequence of
the problems associated with attribution of different mental
states to others (Baron-Cohen 1995). With respect to
attribution of emotional states, any component of alignment that is associated with social affect might be
impaired. With respect to attribution of knowledge states,
any component of alignment that is associated with communicative design might be impaired.
Yet, despite the possibilities raised above that individuals with AS may be unable or unlikely to engage in linguistic alignment, to date, there is no direct empirical
evidence to support this. There is evidence that some
individuals with AS display aberrant rhythm and intonation
during conversation with others (e.g. Paul et al. 2009) and
demonstrate pedantic and overly formal word choices (e.g.
Ghaziuddin and Gerstein 1996), suggesting that they do not
always spontaneously align with their conversational
partner’s behaviour at these levels. These studies did not,
however, directly examine alignment or non-alignment of
linguistic behaviour. In fact, the one previous study that
examined a single type of linguistic alignment in children
with ASD found evidence for intact syntactic alignment.
Allen et al. (2011) examined syntactic convergence in
children with ASD using a game requiring descriptions of
picture cards. Children were more likely to produce
descriptions with passive rather than active structures after
hearing passive structures produced by their partner. Critically, children with ASD in this study performed at a
similar level to both chronological and verbal age matched
typically developing children, with all groups of participants showing significant levels of syntactic convergence.
Allen et al. (2011) suggested that these results indicate that
low-level structural priming in linguistic contexts is an
intact mechanism in children with ASD.
The current study aimed to extend the work of Allen
et al. (2011) in several ways. Firstly, evidence indicates
that alignment processes change through childhood (Garrod and Clark 1993), and at least some current explanations
for syntactic alignment would predict alignment to be
stronger in children than in adults (Chang et al. 2006).
Much of our knowledge of pervasive developmental disorders is based on research with children, with few studies
directly testing how the behavioural manifestations of these
disorders change over the lifespan. It was therefore
important to establish whether the syntactic alignment
demonstrated by young children with ASD on a basic task
was maintained through development and thus also demonstrated by adults with AS on a more complex task.
Secondly, we wanted to investigate several levels of linguistic alignment in one sample of participants. Suggestions have been made that linguistic alignment at one level
(e.g. syntactic) can predict and enhance alignment at other
levels (e.g. semantic), with more levels of linguistic
alignment leading to enhanced mutual understanding
(Pickering and Garrod 2004). These assumptions are,
however, challenged by some empirical data showing that
typically developing children could align at a lexical, but
not a semantic level, leading to communication failures
(Garrod and Clark 1993): thus alignment at one level is not
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always predictive of alignment at other levels and alignment at a single level is not sufficient for successful
communication between conversational partners. It is
therefore critical to examine several different levels of
alignment simultaneously in order to comprehensively
assess the functioning of the system. Third, as different
levels of linguistic alignment are suggested to be differentially influenced by unmediated and mediated mechanisms (syntactic alignment has been primarily explained in
terms of linguistic priming, whereas alignment on levels of
language more directly connected with meaning, such as
lexical choice, has been associated with communicative
design; Branigan et al. 2010), studying multiple levels may
allow us to investigate if these suggested mechanisms are
differentially impaired in individuals with AS.
Consequently, in order to address these aims, we
examined linguistic alignment at three levels: lexical,
syntactic and spatial frame of reference. Our objective was
to compare performance of individuals with and without
AS on these different levels of linguistic alignment. Participants communicated with a confederate they could not
see to complete two cooperative goal-directed tasks. The
first task was based on Branigan et al.’s (2000) card sorting
and description task where the confederate produced prime
descriptions containing certain grammatical structures,
allowing us to test syntactic alignment. The second task
was a novel puzzle solving task, where the participant and
confederate gave each other instructions as to the correct
location to place cards, that depicted different objects, on a
grid. Participants had to describe the object on the card and
the correct location of each card, which enabled us to test
both lexical and frame of reference alignment.
It was predicted that, in line with the results from Allen
et al. (2011), that adults with AS would align on a syntactic
level with their interlocutor, at similar rates to TD adults.
This would suggest that low level linguistic priming
mechanisms are intact in individuals with AS. Although
convergence on choice of lexical items can be also be
explained in terms of implicit linguistic priming, research
suggests that a large component of such lexical alignment
may be based on beliefs about a listener’s perspective (e.g.
Branigan et al. 2011; Brennan and Clark 1996). Similarly,
alignment on spatial frame of reference is harder to attribute to low level priming mechanisms and likely requires a
degree of perspective taking and conscious imitation of an
interlocutor. Given the difficulties individuals with AS can
have in tailoring communication to the listener’s specific
needs and perspective (Paul et al. 2009), it was predicted
that adults with AS may show less lexical and frame of
reference alignment than TD adults. This study will
therefore test (1) whether the conversational difficulties
encountered by individuals with AS are attributable to a
fundamental deficit in the ability to linguistically align with
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an interlocutor and (2) whether performance over a number
of different levels of alignment can illuminate the extent to
which the underpinning mechanisms are intact or impaired
in this population.
Methods
Participants
Seventeen adults with AS participated in this study. All
participants were previously diagnosed by a clinical psychologist, psychiatrist or paediatrician following an evaluation of communication, reciprocal social interactions and
repetitive behaviours. No participant had received a clinical
diagnosis of a co-morbid behavioural or motor disorder. For
11 of these 17 AS participants where copies of their diagnosis
reports were not available, we obtained ADOS scores, which
ranged from 7 to 9 (mean = 8.09), supporting the clinical
diagnosis of AS for these individuals. The remaining six
participants provided us with copies of their detailed clinical
diagnosis reports, which were issued by qualified medical
practitioners (clinical psychologist; psychiatrist) after diagnostic interviews with the participant and in some cases their
parents (e.g. ADI-R; ADOS), but did not provide any related
numerical scores. Seventeen typically developing (TD)
adults also participated in this study (Table 1 shows the age
and gender of all participants). TD adults were asked if they
had any disabilities and were explicitly asked if they had ever
received any diagnosis of AS or ASD. All TD adults in the
sample confirmed they had never had such a diagnosis. All
participants were native English speakers with normal
hearing and received payment to compensate them for their
travel costs and time. This study received ethical approval
from the Department of Psychology, University of York
Ethical Review Board.
In order to ensure the AS and TD groups were well
matched in cognitive skills relevant to successful performance in the alignment tasks we conducted the following
cognitive tests with all participants:
1.
Intelligence Quotient (IQ). All control and seven AS
participants completed the Wechsler Abbreviated
Table 1 Demographic information for participants
Group
Females
Males
Mean age (SD)
Age range
AS (N = 17)
4
13
26.41 (9.08)
18–51
Control (N = 17)
4
13
22.25 (2.70)
19–28
An independent samples t test revealed there was no significant difference in the mean ages of the two groups (t (19) = 1.89, p = 0.074;
unequal variances assumed; Levene’s test for equality of variances
F = 9.64, p = 0.004)
J Autism Dev Disord
2.
3.
Scale of Intelligence (WASI) consisting of matrix
reasoning and expressive vocabulary tasks, whilst the
remaining ten AS participants completed the full
Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale III (WAIS-III),
both of which are standard measures of IQ.
Receptive vocabulary. All participants completed the
British Picture Vocabulary Scale (BPVS; Dunn et al.
1997). Whilst traditionally a scale implemented in
children, the BPVS allowed us to check the receptive
vocabulary of participants was sufficient to successfully complete the alignment tasks.
Working memory. All participants completed a forward and backward digit span task (both verbally and
spatially; part of the Wechsler Memory Scale-III) to
provide measures of verbal and non-verbal working
memory. Both alignment tasks engaged working
memory and therefore this factor was assessed as a
potential confound for group level performance.
As demonstrated in Table 2, the groups of AS and TD
participants did not differ statistically in their scores
across these tests, and were therefore well matched on IQ,
working memory and receptive vocabulary abilities. Thus
any group differences that we observe are attributable to
processes underlying linguistic alignment and are not
related to the ability to deal with basic task demands.
Experiment 1: Syntactic Alignment Task
This task was based on Branigan et al. (2000) and required
a confederate to play a card sorting game with the participant, under the guidance of two experimenters.
Materials
Experimental materials comprised 12 experimental items
and 72 fillers (36 for the confederate and 36 for the
participant). Each experimental item comprised a pair of
picture cards (the confederate’s prime card and the participant’s target card), plus a scripted prime description for
the confederate’s card. Prime and target pictures showed a
ditransitive event involving an agent, a patient and a
beneficiary, with the appropriate verb printed beneath
(Fig. 1). Filler cards depicted transitive events involving an
agent and patient (Fig. 1).
There were four different confederate scripts; across
scripts each prime card was described once and thus it
appeared in each of the four conditions yielded by crossing
the factors Prime Structure and Verb type: Prime structure
had two conditions: prepositional object (PO) structure
(e.g. ‘‘The waitress offers a cake to the ballerina’’) and a
double object (DO) structure (e.g. ‘‘The waitress offers the
ballerina a cake’’; Fig. 2). Verb type also had two conditions: Same (the prime and target picture involved the same
verb) and Different (the prime and target picture involved
different verbs). Previous research has demonstrated that
syntactic alignment in TD speakers is stronger when the
verb is repeated between prime and target descriptions, but
also occurs reliably when the verb is not repeated (and
hence when the only relationship between the prime and
target sentences is at the level of abstract syntactic structure). Within scripts six targets appeared in each of the two
prime conditions and the order of the two prime conditions
was counterbalanced across scripts. This yielded four different scripts (Table 3; Fig. 2).
Participants were randomly assigned to one of the four
scripts. The order of the experimental items was randomised once for the creation of the first script and this order of
cards was then used for all four scripts.
Procedure
Set up The participant and the confederate each had two
sets of cards: a ‘description’ set, which they had to describe
to the other player, and a ‘selection set’, from which they
had to find cards matching the other player’s descriptions
(hence, the confederate’s description set and the participant’s selection set were identical; and similarly the participant’s description set and the confederate’s selection set
were identical). The confederate and participant took turns
describing and selecting cards. The card sets were ordered
so that a confederate’s prime card description immediately
preceded a participant’s target card description. There were
Table 2 Mean scores for each group on measures of IQ, receptive vocabulary and working memory
IQ
Vocabulary
Working memory
Mean IQ score (SD)
Mean raw BPVS score (SD)
Mean verbal digit span (SD)
AS (N = 17)
111.18 (22.18)
148.12 (11.64)
18.71 (5.47)
16.18 (5.42)
Control (N = 17)
114.24 (10.27)
151.24 (7.70)
18.00 (4.36)
18.19 (3.37)
Mean spatial span (SD)
t
0.52
0.92
0.42
1.29
p value
0.609
0.364
0.680
0.206
T statistics and 2-tailed p values from independent samples t-tests indicated there were no significant differences between groups on any of these
measures (degrees of freedom = 32)
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Fig. 1 Example cards:
a experimental card where the
pirate is the agent, the gun is the
patient and the clown is the
beneficiary. b Filler card where
the nun is the agent, the jug is
the patient and there is no
beneficiary
Fig. 2 Illustration of different
conditions in the syntactic
alignment task. Verb type was
manipulated across scripts so
participants experienced prime
and target pictures involving the
same verb or different verbs.
Prime structure was
manipulated within each script
so the confederate gave a
description of the prime card
with either a prepositional
object (PO) or a double object
(DO) structure. The descriptions
of the participant cards that
align with the PO and DO prime
descriptions are also shown
Table 3 The four types of script used in the syntactic alignment task
Script
First 6 prime
descriptions
Last 6 prime
descriptions
Verb
type
1
PO
DO
Same
2
DO
PO
Same
3
PO
DO
Different
4
DO
PO
Different
DO double object structure, PO prepositional object structure
three randomly chosen filler cards between each experimental card. The ordered description set for each player
was placed in a pile on the desk in front of them. The
selection set for each player was set out on a 4 9 6 grid,
with the two cards for each verb placed on top of one
another. Each player also had a box in which to put
selected cards. The confederate had a script specifying the
appropriate prime description for each experimental card.
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The task was set out for the participant and the confederate
on two tables positioned side by side, with a movable
opaque divider between the tables.
Experimental Trial When the participant entered the
room he/she could see both tables set up identically. The
participant was told that the study aimed to examine how
people cooperate and communicate to solve a task when
they could not see each other. After the participant provided informed consent, the second experimenter entered
with the confederate, who was introduced and sat at the
other table. The confederate was treated as, and acted as, a
naı̈ve participant throughout the session. An opaque divider
was then moved between participants, before starting the
tasks, to ensure they could not see each other. The participant and the confederate were given the option of
receiving written or verbal instructions. If written instructions were chosen a verbal summary of the main points was
J Autism Dev Disord
subsequently provided. Participants were told to take turns
to describe the cards in their respective description piles
and to find the cards that matched their partner’s descriptions in their selection grid of cards. They were instructed
that they could only say ‘‘Please repeat’’ to request repetition of a description. Before the experiment, there was a
practice session involving four cards. The experimenter
stood by the participant during the practice session and
aided them as necessary. In both sessions, the experimenter
asked the confederate to start the game, and thus to give the
first description of a card. This ensured that the confederate’s description of a prime card always immediately preceded the participant’s description of an experimental card.
The experimental session was audio-recorded using a
Marantz PCM-600 solid state sound recorder. Participants’
descriptions of all experimental cards were recorded by the
experimenter in real time and later checked against the
audio recording. In line with Branigan et al. (2000), we
coded the first response that the subject produced; we
coded the descriptions as PO if the inanimate patient
immediately followed the verb and preceded the preposition ‘to’ and the beneficiary of the action. Descriptions
were coded as DO if the verb was followed by the beneficiary of the action and then followed by the inanimate
patient.
One participant with AS could not complete the task due
to a tendency to provide an extremely detailed literal
description of what was in front of him in every trial. (e.g.
‘‘I have a card and on the left hand side there is a line
drawing of a man with a rubber ring around his middle and
goggles on his face and drips of water falling from his
body. His left leg is extended out to the right. On the right
side of the card there is a line drawing of a man with a large
anchor tattoo on his right arm and a smaller anchor tattoo
on his left arm. He has a cap on and he could be a sailor.
Under the line drawings there is the word kick’’). When in
the practice trials, the experimenter gave an example
description for the same card (e.g. ‘‘the swimmer kicks the
sailor’’), the participant stated that it was ‘very abstract’
and could not make sense of it. The participant could
interpret the confederate’s brief ‘abstract’ descriptions but
could not produce them himself. His data could not be
meaningfully coded for this experiment, and was therefore
excluded, so the AS sample comprised 16 individuals for
the following analysis.
Results
We calculated the percentage of syntactic alignment for
each participant on this task, that is, the percentage of trials
where the participants used the same sentence structure as
the immediately previous prime. These data were subject to
analysis using a General Linear Model with Group (AS vs.
control) and Verb type (same vs. different) entered as
between-participants factors and Prime structure (PO vs.
DO) entered as a within-participants factor. The percentage
of alignment was the dependent variable.
There was a significant main effect of prime type [F(1,
29) = 11.74, p = 0.002, g2p = 0.288] with more alignment
elicited by the PO primes (mean = 85.86 %, SD = 27.99)
than DO primes (mean = 54.56 %, SD = 37.32). There was
a significant main effect of verb type [F(1, 29) = 8.47,
p = 0.007, g2p = 0.226] with more alignment occurring with
same verbs (mean = 79.40 %, SD = 14.47) than different
verbs (mean = 60.40 %, SD = 23.55). There was no significant main effect of group [F(1, 29) = 0.58, p = 0.452,
g2p = 0.020] with AS participants (mean = 70.30 %,
SD = 22.15) and control participants (mean = 69.10 %,
SD = 21.80) aligning to a similar degree overall. There were
no significant interactions between any of the three variables
[group*verb type F(1, 29) = 0.05, p = 0.829; group*prime
type F(1, 29) = 0.37, p = 0.550; Prime type*verb type
F(1, 29) = 0.08, p = 0.775; group*verb type*prime type
F(1, 329) = 0.279, p = 0.601].
On an individual basis, in order to be aligning with the
confederate at a level significantly above chance, participants had to align on 10/12 experimental items [2-tailed
Binomial (0.5), p = 0.039]. Seven out of 17 control participants and eight out of 16 AS participants aligned with
the confederate at a rate significantly above chance. A
2-tailed Fisher’s exact test showed there was not a significantly different proportion of individual aligners in the
two groups (p = 0.732).
Individuals with AS can have difficulty with task
switching (e.g. van Eylen et al. 2011), so in order to assess
whether this negatively affected performance in the second
half of the task when the confederate switched the prime
type, we also examined the performance of AS and control
participants on the first 6 items and the last 6 items. As
illustrated in Table 4 we found this not to be a problem in
this task, since the performance of the AS group in the two
halves of the task was the same as the control participants.
Experiment 2: Lexical and Frame of Reference
Alignment Task
This novel task required a confederate to play a cooperative
puzzle game with the participant, which allowed the
measurement of alignment at the lexical and spatial frame
of reference levels.
Materials
The participant and confederate were each presented with
two separate sets of 20 cards to allow two games to be
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Table 4 Performance of AS and control participants on the first and
last 6 items of the syntactic alignment task
Prime
type
order
Group
Mean % alignment
on first 6 items (SD)
Mean % alignment
on last 6 items (SD)
DO then
PO
Control
(N = 8)
64.58 (32.66)
95.83 (7.72)
AS
(N = 9)
75.93 (23.73)
83.33 (33.33)
Control
(N = 9)
79.63 (27.36)
38.89 (40.83)
AS
(N = 7)
80.95 (37.80)
35.67 (40.17)
PO then
DO
Mean alignment given as percentage of trials where participants
copied the syntactic structure of the given prime. Standard deviations
are shown in parentheses
DO double object structure, PO prepositional object structure
played. Cards consisted of line drawings of concrete
objects with high familiarity ratings, taken from Snodgrass
and Vanderwart (1980). In each set eight experimental
cards showed line drawings of objects with two possible
lexical labels (e.g. Figure 3).
Previous research by Branigan et al. (2011) has shown
that the common name (e.g. church) is used for these items
over the uncommon name (e.g. chapel) at least 80 % of the
time. The remaining 12 cards in each set were filler cards
with only one commonly used lexical label (e.g. giraffe).
The experimental cards were common to both participant
and confederate sets, whilst for the 48 filler cards used over
the two games, 31 were unique and 17 were common to
both the participant’s and confederate’s sets of cards.
The participant and confederate each had a large piece
of card on the table in front of them with a 4 9 5 grid
drawn on it, where they had to place cards to complete their
‘puzzle’ (Fig. 4).
Fig. 3 An example experimental card that will be more commonly
described as a church and uncommonly described as a chapel
123
They also had a ‘solution’ sheet showing them the
correct positioning for all cards on their partner’s grid
(Fig. 5).
Each picture on the solution sheet was numbered to
indicate to the participant the order in which they had to
describe the pictures to their partner (Fig. 5). The sequence
used was designed to ensure that during the task the confederate always got to describe each of their experimental
cards before the participant. The participant, however,
never encountered the experimental card immediately after
the confederate described it: there were either two or four
filler cards after the confederate’s description of the
experimental card, before the participant had to describe it.
More precisely, for five experimental cards there were two
filler cards between the confederate and participant
descriptions of the card and for three experimental cards
there were four filler cards between the confederate and
participant descriptions of the card. The solution was
laminated to allow participants to cross off each item once
it had been described.
The confederate had a script to ensure that the uncommon name was given to all experimental cards and that an
egocentric frame of reference was used throughout. We
distinguished between egocentric descriptions where the
card’s position on the grid was indicated relative to the
speaker and allocentric descriptions where the card’s
position was indicated relative to other cards on the grid.
The confederate described the location of cards egocentrically and thus self-referentially: in the horizontal domain
as ‘column furthest to my right/left’, ‘second furthest to the
right/left’ or ‘middle column’. In the vertical domain as
‘row closest to me’, ‘row second closest/furthest away
from me’ and ‘row furthest away from me’. Pilot data
indicated that most individuals naturally adopt an allocentric rather than an egocentric frame of reference to
solve this task: in a short written task 123 native English
speaking participants (62 females/61 males; mean age
22.24, age range 18–56) were asked how they would
describe the location of two items on a grid to someone out
of sight who had their own copy of the grid. In line with the
real task an additional item was already in place on the
grid, providing the option for allocentric descriptions to be
given. For the first item three participants gave both egocentric and allocentric descriptions and were excluded. Of
the remaining 120 participants, 93 (77.50 %) gave an
allocentric description and a 2-tailed binomial test (0.5)
revealed this was significantly above that expected by
chance (p \ 0.001). For the second item, two participants
used both methods of description and were excluded.
Ninety-nine of the remaining 121 participants (81.82 %)
gave allocentric descriptions and a 2-tailed binomial test
(0.5) revealed this is significantly above that expected by
chance (p \ 0.001).
J Autism Dev Disord
Fig. 4 Set up of the lexical and spatial frame of reference alignment
task: The confederate and participant sat side by side at adjacent
tables, and an opaque barrier (A) was positioned between them to
ensure participant and confederate could not see each other and could
only use verbal descriptions. Illustrated are B piece of card showing
the 4 9 5 grid for cards to be placed on, with one starting card
already in place C three piles of cards (total N = 19) to be placed on
the grid in response to the instructions of the playing partner; D a
solution sheet illustrating the solution to the partner’s puzzle; E chair
The pilot data presented here suggests that using an
egocentric frame of reference is not the preferred way to
solve this problem for native English speakers and thus
provides an opportunity to test alignment to an uncommon
strategy for solving this particular task. Two AS participants completed the task while the confederate used an
allocentric frame of reference, before this pilot data was
collected. Although their lexical data is used, their frame of
reference data is excluded.
shown on the ‘solution sheet’ and then to listen to their
partner’s descriptions in order to choose the right card from
the three piles and place it in the correct position on their
own grid. They were instructed that they could only say
‘‘Please repeat’’ to request repetition of a description.
Before the experiment started, there was a practice
session involving four cards. One of these cards was
already in place on the grid, leaving the participant to
practice describing and placing three cards. The experimenter stood by the participant during the practice session
and aided the participant as necessary. For two AS participants, for whom the task was difficult, the experimenter
explained what rows and columns were to help them
understand the descriptions of the confederate and sat by
the participant helping them place the cards on the grid. If
the participant was struggling to describe the location of
cards the experimenter provided encouragement but did not
give any suggestions about how the participant may complete the trial nor did the experimenter give any feedback
on the accuracy of their attempts. One AS participant was
unable to describe the location of the cards and so the
experimenter intervened and helped him master the row
and column system, in order that he could complete the
task. Frame of reference data for this participant was thus
excluded, but lexical choice data was still used. As a result,
14 AS participants and 17 control participants provided
frame of reference data for final analysis.
In both sessions, the experimenter asked the confederate
to start the game. This was critical to ensure that the
confederate’s description of a prime experimental card
always preceded the subject’s description of an experimental card. At the completion of each game the
Procedure
Set up Figure 4 illustrates the experimental set up. The
participant’s cards necessary for completing their grid were
presented in three piles. The order of cards within each pile
was predetermined so that the card the confederate was
describing was always one of the top cards. One filler card
was previously placed on the grid, as a starting card,
meaning that participant had 19 cards to place in each
game.
Experimental Trial Participants played this game with
the same confederate they interacted with in Experiment 1.
The confederate was treated as and acted as a naı̈ve participant throughout. The participant and confederate sat
side by side, with an opaque divider in place between them
to ensure they could not see each other (Fig. 4). The participant and the confederate were given the option of
written or verbal instructions. If written instructions were
chosen a verbal summary of the main points was subsequently provided. Participants were told to take turns to
describe each piece of their partner’s puzzle in the order
123
J Autism Dev Disord
Fig. 5 An illustration of the solution sheet, which indicated to the participant what their partner’s finished puzzle should look like, and the order
in which they should describe the pictures to complete the task
experimenter took a photograph of the participant’s and
confederate’s completed grids, to reinforce the idea that the
participants’ cooperative performance was being assessed
and thus reduce the chances of the real purpose of the study
being guessed by participants. After completing the whole
study all participants were debriefed about the true aims of
the two experiments.
The experimental session was audio-recorded using a
Marantz PCM-600 solid state sound recorder and was later
transcribed. For experimental items, lexical alignment was
coded if the participant named the picture using the
uncommon name that had been primed by the confederate.
When participants described the picture using more than
one word (e.g. ‘‘the couch or sofa’’) the trial was coded as
aligning as long as the uncommon primed name had been
used.
Frame of reference alignment to the spatial descriptions of card locations were coded in the following way.
123
Globally, responses were coded as allocentric if the
participant described locations in relation to other cards
on the grid and egocentric if they used spatial description
implementing rows, columns and/or left and right in
relation to themselves. The response for each card was
coded as allocentric, egocentric or both (e.g. it’s in the
left corner closest to me, two down from the spoon) and
a mean proportion of responses that aligned to the confederate’s egocentric descriptions was calculated for each
participant. For the purpose of statistical analysis, we
adopted a conservative approach and considered only
egocentric responses as alignment. Within the egocentric
responses, some participants consistently used row and
column descriptions and for these participants we examined an additional level of alignment: whether the order
of the column and row descriptions aligned with the
confederate who always stated the column before the
row.
J Autism Dev Disord
Results
Lexical Alignment
Overall participants showed lexical alignment with the confederate to describe over half of the 16 experimental items
using the uncommon name. An independent samples t test
indicated that there was no significant difference between the
performance of AS participants (N = 17, mean = 53.31 %,
SD = 16.99) and control participants [N = 17, mean =
60.29 %, SD = 16.67; t (32) = 1.21, p = 0.235].
At the individual level, participants needed to use the
uncommon name on 7/16 items in order to be aligning at a
level significantly above that expected by chance [2-tailed
Binomial (0.2), p = 0.027]. 16/17 control participants and
12/17 AS participants aligned at a level significantly above
chance. A 2-tailed Fisher’s Exact test revealed there was no
significant difference between the proportion of individual
‘lexical aligners’ in the two groups (p = 0.175).
Frame of Reference Alignment
Participants from both groups aligned to the egocentric
frame of reference at very high levels. When considering
only the egocentric responses as aligning with the confederate, an independent samples t test demonstrated there
was no significant difference in the amount of alignment
in control participants (mean = 90.88 %, SD = 11.62) and
AS participants [92.30 %, SD = 13.19; t(29) = 0.32,
p = 0.752].
At the individual level, participants needed to use the
egocentric frame of reference on 26/38 items in order to be
aligning at a level significantly above that expected by
chance [2-tailed Binomial (0.5), p = 0.034]. 16/17 control
participants and 12/14 AS participants aligned at a level
significantly above chance. A 2-tailed Fisher’s exact test
revealed there was no significant difference between the
proportion of ‘aligners’ in the two groups (p = 0.576).
Eighteen participants (11 control/7 AS) described the
location of cards using rows and columns in 10 or more of
their spatial descriptions. The confederate always gave the
column position before the row position. Most participants
using this column-row system also aligned on the confederate’s order, with a mean of 78.42 % (SD = 28.88) of the
control participants’ descriptions starting with the column
position and a mean of 76.31 % (SD = 18.21) of the AS
participant descriptions following the confederate’s order.
Discussion
No significant difference was found between the performance of adults with and without AS at any of the three
levels of linguistic alignment tested. Experiment 1 showed
that at the level of syntactic alignment, individuals with AS
showed slightly higher levels of convergence with the
confederate than controls, but not at a significant level.
Performance across the two groups was consistent with
previously published work using this task, with higher
levels of alignment with the PO rather than DO structures
and a greater effect of the prime when the participant’s
experimental card contained the same verb as the confederate’s prime (Branigan et al. 2000). It is important to note
that in this task, participants did not simply repeat verbatim
the exact phrases produced the confederate; rather they
imitated the abstract syntactic structure of the confederate’s
utterances, combining it with novel lexical content to
convey new meanings. These results indicate that linguistic
priming mechanisms, likely to underpin such syntactic
alignment, are intact in individuals with AS.
Experiment 2 showed that at the level of lexical alignment participants with and without AS converged with the
confederate to use the uncommon name for over 50 % of
the objects (only 20 % expected based on normal usage)
and at an individual level the majority of participants in
each group aligned at a level significantly above that
expected by chance. At the level of frame of reference
alignment, participants in both groups overwhelmingly
adopted the confederate’s egocentric frame of reference to
describe the spatial location of cards. Over 90 % of participants’ descriptions in both groups converged on an
egocentric rather than an allocentric frame of reference,
despite pilot data indicating that allocentric descriptions in
this type of task were significantly more likely in the
absence of a prime. This study shows that lexical and frame
of reference alignment can be successfully tested using this
novel confederate scripted paradigm.
Taken together the performance of adults with AS
across these three levels of linguistic alignment indicates
that the ability and tendency to align with interlocutors
appears to be intact in AS. Adults with AS converged with
a confederate on the use of lexical items, syntactic structures and a spatial frame of reference, without any explicit
instruction to do so. This supports the finding of Allen et al.
(2011) of syntactic convergence in children with ASD. The
success of individuals with AS in aligning across different
levels indicates that both low level priming mechanisms
and ‘communicative design’ mechanisms such as conscious imitation and sensitivity to the listener’s perspective,
that are thought to underpin syntactic and lexical/frame of
reference alignment respectively, are likely intact. The
success of these adults across three levels of linguistic
alignment also indicates that the basic mechanisms for
alignment are in place to support the ultimate alignment of
situation models (Pickering and Garrod 2004) and thus
successful communication. However, given some of the
123
J Autism Dev Disord
specific conversational difficulties associated with AS,
such as tailoring information appropriately for the listener’s needs, are indicative of a failure to converge on a
shared situational model, the extent to which linguistic
alignment actually results in alignment of situation models
in individuals with AS, as it is posited to do in TD individuals, remains a matter for further empirical testing. Our
results do suggest, however, that there is no fundamental
impairment in the basic ability to align with a conversational partner.
Thus, contrary to our predictions, individuals with AS
showed no difficulty with alignment on a lexical level,
which has been shown by previous research to be influenced by beliefs about the interlocutor (Branigan et al.
2011), nor on a frame of reference level, which might
similarly be expected to involve the ability to distinguish
between one’s own and another’s perspective. Indeed,
some individuals with AS who showed particularly high
levels of alignment at the level of frame of reference
explained at debrief that they had found the confederate’s
spatial descriptions odd at first, but had consciously
adopted the same system in order to succeed with the task.
This anecdotally indicates that a degree of perspective
taking and conscious imitation was employed successfully
by participants with AS to strategically increase successful
communication. Indeed, more participants showed alignment on an individual level on the lexical and frame of
reference task than the syntactic task. This may reflect the
greater benefits alignment brought to the second task in
terms of successful communication to reach the goal and
thus illustrate strategic use of alignment to facilitate successful communication. This performance-based drive to
align in order to minimise misunderstandings and increase
success on a task is similar to the proposed motivations
for the high levels of alignment people show in cooperative tasks with computers (Branigan et al. 2011). It may
be that the highly structured nature of the social interaction created in this study and the strong goal-directed
nature of the task facilitated the use of alignment strategies to enhance successful communication. This suggestion is in line with a recent study showing that within the
confines of a highly structured social task, the performance of individuals with ASD on a complex perspective
taking task was indistinguishable from that of TD individuals (Begeer et al. 2010).
Future research should test whether individuals with AS
demonstrate linguistic alignment in natural conversations,
where the interaction is less structured, the goal of effective
communication may be less salient, and the goal of social
affiliation may be more salient. If successful alignment at
all three levels of linguistic structure, observed in this
study, was largely a result of low level priming mechanisms, then this pattern of alignment should transfer to
123
more naturalistic settings. However, if it largely reflected
mechanisms mediated by beliefs about their conversational
partner’s mental states, it is predicted that lower levels of
alignment would be found in individuals with AS in natural
conversation: greater cognitive load in a less structured
interactions may limit the use of such strategies, and the
motivation to employ them may be lower in the absence of
a clear task goal. Additionally, it seems plausible that
individuals with AS may not be motivated by a desire to
increase affiliative bonds with the interlocutor in the way
that one would expect to be the case for TD individuals,
and in a less goal-oriented set up this difference may
manifest itself. It may be that the highly structured nature
of the social interaction created in this study and the strong
goal directed nature of the task facilitated the use of
alignment strategies to enhance successful communication.
Whilst the success of individuals with AS across different levels of alignment, which are posited to be driven
by different mechanisms, suggests that both implicit
priming and more explicit communicative design mechanisms are likely intact in this population, further investigation into the mechanisms underpinning this behaviour
are needed. More specifically, although the behavioural
results of the TD and AS groups were the same, we cannot
directly assess whether the mechanisms underpinning linguistic alignment in the two groups were the same or different. For instance, there is the possibility that, while in
the TD group linguistic alignment at some levels may have
been implicit and spontaneous, the linguistic alignment in
the AS group may have reflected a more effortful and
deliberate process, which might compensate for a deficit in
implicit and spontaneous processing. There is evidence
supporting the recruitment of strategic mechanisms to
compensate for deficits in implicit processing in AS in
other realms, including social cognition. For example,
several studies have reported that individuals with AS fail
to spontaneously interpret social cues (such as direction of
attention), but can deliberately reason about them (e.g.
Senju et al. 2009; Jellema et al. 2009; Hudson et al. 2012).
Equally, several studies of facial emotion recognition have
found no differences at the behavioural level between
individuals with and without ASD (see Harms et al. 2010,
for a review), even though distinct differences are found in
terms of event related potential (ERP) components (e.g.
Wong et al. 2008) and activity in emotion processing circuitry in imaging studies (e.g. Ashwin et al. 2007). Such
different brain activity patterns may suggest the use of
compensatory mechanisms. In future, collecting more
measures of performance (e.g. speed of processing,
neurophysiological measures) whilst completing linguistic
alignment tasks may help to elucidate potential differences
in the mechanisms underlying the linguistic alignment
behaviour of individuals with and without AS.
J Autism Dev Disord
In summary, in this study we found that adults with AS
demonstrated linguistic alignment in terms of lexical
choice, syntactic structure and spatial frame of reference,
that was no different from that of matched control participants. Our results indicate that both low-level linguistic
priming mechanisms and strategic use of alignment to
facilitate successful communication in pursuit of a common goal, are likely intact in AS. These findings suggest
that the communicative and conversational difficulties,
which characterise AS, do not seem attributable to a fundamental deficit in the ability to linguistically align with an
interlocutor, in structured goal-directed social interactions.
Although we have shown that the basic ability to align is
intact, we highlight that differential use of this ability in
natural conversations may still play an important casual
role in some of the communicative difficulties characterising AS. Further studies are therefore needed to build on
these findings and directly probe the mechanisms underlying linguistic alignment in this population and to investigate whether alignment occurs in natural conversation,
outside these highly structured goal-directed social
interactions.
Acknowledgments We are grateful to Kate Brook, Sara Shaikh,
Francesca Woods, Steph Burchill and Fern Cosgrave for help with
data collection and stimuli creation and to Paula Clarke for advice and
training. This project was funded by the Department of Psychology,
University of York Summer Bursary Scheme 2008 and 2009.
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