Linguistic prediction in autism spectrum disorder

O'Shea, Aimee and Engelhardt, Paul E. (2025) Linguistic prediction in autism spectrum disorder. Brain Sciences, 15 (2). ISSN 2076-3425

Preview

PDF (brainsci-15-00175-v2) - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (525kB) | Preview

Abstract

Autism Spectrum Disorder has been argued to involve impairment in domain-general predictive ability. There is strong evidence that individuals with ASD have trouble navigating the dynamic world due to an inability to predict the outcome of particular events. There is also evidence that this is apparent across diagnostic criteria of ASD and common among correlates of ASD. Howev-er, the question remains as to whether this impairment in predictive abilities is domain-specific or domain-general, with little research investigating prediction in linguistic measures. The current study investigated whether individuals with ASD show atypicalities in linguistic prediction using a cloze probability task. In Experiment 1, 33 individuals with ASD were compared to 64 typically-developing individuals in an offline cloze task. There was no significant effect of ASD diagnosis on cloze probability. However, individuals with higher levels of autistic traits were significantly more likely to produce lower probability (non-modal) cloze responses. In Experiment 2, 19 individuals with ASD were compared to 22 typically-developing individuals on a lab-based cloze task, in which we also measured reaction times to begin speaking (i.e., voice onset time). Results showed that individuals with ASD had significantly slower reaction times (~200 ms), but similar to Experi-ment 1, did not show differences in the cloze probability of responses produced. We conclude that individuals with ASD do show inefficiency in linguistic prediction, as well as which ASD traits most strongly correlate with these inefficiencies.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Data Availability Statement: The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors on request. Funding Information: This research received no external funding.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	autism spectrum disorder,linguistic prediction,cloze probability,voice onset time,3* ,/dk/atira/pure/researchoutput/REFrank/3_
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Psychology
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > UEA Experimental Philosophy Group
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	10 Feb 2025 13:30
Last Modified:	14 Feb 2025 16:30
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/98422
DOI:	10.3390/brainsci15020175

Downloads

Actions (login required)

View Item