Gaze-Speech Coordination During Narration in Autism Spectrum Disorder and First-Degree Relatives

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Developmental Psychology
• Linguistics

Background:

• Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is associated with social-communication differences.
• These differences may stem from genetic factors influencing social-communication skills.
• Coordination of multimodal signals, like gaze and speech, is crucial for social communication and often impaired in ASD.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate gaze-speech coordination as a mechanism for narrative and pragmatic differences in ASD.
• To compare gaze-speech coordination between autistic individuals, non-autistic individuals, and their first-degree relatives.
• To examine the relationship between gaze-speech coordination and narrative quality/pragmatic language skills.

Main Methods:

• Simultaneous recording and coding of gaze and speech during picture book narration.
• Time series analyses to quantify temporal (lead of gaze to speech) and content (gaze-speech correspondence) coordination.
• Comparison of coordination metrics between autistic and non-autistic groups and parent groups, and correlation with narrative and pragmatic skills.

Main Results:

• Autistic individuals exhibited reduced temporal coordination but increased content coordination compared to non-autistic individuals.
• No significant differences in coordination were observed between parent groups.
• Increased content coordination and reduced temporal coordination were linked to poorer narrative quality and pragmatic language skills, respectively.

Conclusions:

• Reduced temporal and increased content coordination in ASD may represent a strategy of labeling items upon visualization.
• This pattern might suggest limited visual, linguistic, and cognitive processing, contributing to social-communicative differences.
• Multimodal skill coordination is identified as a potential mechanism underlying social-communicative differences in ASD and their relatives, suggesting mechanism-based interventions.