Only saying 'mm' is not enough: Conversational responding By autistic and neurotypical children.

Background:

During a conversation, minimal responses are those which do not add information to the preceding turn, nor provide an opportunity for one’s conversation partner to ‘follow in’. Of these, specific responses (e.g., “That’s nice”) can be socially appropriate, as they reflect listener affect and engagement. In contrast, generic responses (e.g., “Yeah”) can be problematic if overused due to their empty, stereotypic nature (Bavelas & Gerwing, 2011). Overuse of generic responses is associated with more negative social impressions, including lower ratings of likeability (Mein, Fey, & Paige, 2016).

Objectives:

Previous research has identified that autistic groups demonstrate other types of inappropriate responses, such as off-topic responses, more frequently than well-matched neurotypicals (e.g., see Sng et al., 2018, for a review). However, less is known about unengaged, minimal responding in autism. In a pre-registered analysis, we examined inappropriate conversational responding in 36 autistic and 36 neurotypical 9-13-year-old children.

Methods:

We used 15 pre-planned declarative statements (probes) to elicit naturalistic conversation with participants. Verbal responses to each probe were coded as on-topic, off-topic, or minimal. Off-topic responses were categorised together with generic, unengaged minimal responses as ‘inappropriate’.

Results:

Across response types, autistic participants produced a significantly higher proportion of inappropriate verbal responses (M=0.41) than matched neurotypical controls (M=0.22) (p<.01, d = .40). This included more off-topic responses (p<.001, d = .27), fewer on-topic responses (p<.001, d = -.34), and more unengaged, minimal responses (p<.05, d = .26).

Conclusions:

Our findings of higher rates of off-topic responding in autism mirror previous studies. We are also the first to demonstrate that, even when providing only a minimal response, autistic children respond inappropriately more frequently than neurotypical peers. Since minimal responses do not burden sentence production abilities, this finding suggests that conversational difficulties in autistic children are unlikely to be due solely to any atypical linguistic skills. In addition, since this conversational behaviour can be perceived negatively by others (Mein et al., 2016), a tendency to provide generic, minimal responses may also adversely impact the peer relationships of autistic children.