This presentation examines lexical alignment, the tendency for interlocutors to use similar words in conversation. Autistic children, who often have challenges in social cognition, are theorised to exhibit a lower degree of lexical alignment than their neurotypical peers. However, previous studies that employed highly structured experimental tasks have consistently found a comparable degree of lexical alignment between autistic and neurotypical children.

This study aimed to examine the lexical alignment of autistic and neurotypical early school-aged children with their respective adult conversational partners, using a semi-structured conversational paradigm. Two conversational corpora, one of the neurotypical child-adult interactions (i.e., 45 children) and the other of autistic child-adult interactions (i.e., 26 children) were developed. In each corpus, the child engaged in two 10-minute play-based conversational sessions: one with a parent (i.e., familiar partner) and the other with a university student (i.e., unfamiliar partner).

Bayesian mixed-effect model was used to compare lexical alignment between dyads involving the neurotypical children and autistic children and to investigate whether alignment of autistic child-adult dyads was influenced by partner types.

Findings indicated that both groups of dyads exhibited lexical alignment above the level of chance, with the autistic child-adult dyads demonstrating a higher degree of alignment than neurotypical child-adult dyads. Further, partner type did not influence lexical alignment in autistic child-adult dyads.

These findings provide preliminary evidence that autistic and neurotypical children align their lexicons in a semi-structured conversational paradigm, although there are quantitative differences. Suggestions for future research are discussed to advance our understanding of lexical alignment for autistic and neurotypical children.

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