MSc + PhD How children develop an understanding of conversational back-and-forth; the view from autism

Humans interact primarily through verbal interaction, almost all of which involves conversational turn-taking. There are striking similarities across cultures in the timing with which one speaker takes the 'conversational floor' from another and also regarding the types of conversational responses, which are considered to be off-topic. Yet some individuals - particularly those with Autism Spectrum Conditions - exhibit real difficulties in this domain. For example, verbally fluent autistic children and adolescents tend to respond less, interrupt more and provide more off-topic responses in conversation than their neurotypical counterparts. This can give the impression that the individual is not genuinely interested in their conversational partner, which can hinder friendship formation and maintenance and is a major factor preventing job interview success in adulthood. The aim of the current research is to investigate if, and how, conversational response timing differs between verbally fluent autistic children and their well-matched neurotypical peers. This requires a better understanding of the nature of turn-taking in neurotypical conversation. Research on conversational turn-taking has tended to focus either on the timing of a response or on the 'appropriateness' of the response. No research has considered how timing and appropriateness may be inter-related. Research on timing has investigated how people use cues to predict when their conversational partner will finish his / her turn. This depicts the 'conversational floor' as analogous to a rally between two tennis players. While prediction clearly plays an important role in maintaining the fluency of a conversation, the contribution of 'we-intentionality' has been ignored. We-intentionality is the implicit understanding between two people that they are engaging in something together. That is, for a large proportion of conversational switches, the degree to which it is appropriate for a person to 'take over' the conversational floor may crucially depend on whether his / her new contribution 'builds on' the content of the previous turn and develops the co-constructed topic. Both prediction and we-intentionality have been proposed as core problems for autistic individuals. Therefore, both could potentially account for autistic difficulties with the timing of conversational turns and also with provided relevant conversational contributions. The current research will use a combination of elicited production, forced-choice judgement tasks and eye-tracking to investigate if and when children appropriately respond in a timely manner and also the conceptual understanding of how this should occur when observing the conversations of others. The proposed research will further our understanding of the nature of human conversational turn-taking. It will also allow clinicians to determine whether conversation interventions for autistic children should primarily focus on their conceptual understanding of turn-taking, or on their ability to generate (appropriate) responses.