Oral-Motor and Lexical Diversity During Naturalistic Conversations in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Julia Parish-Morris, Evangelos Sariyanidi, Casey Zampella, G. Keith Bartley, Emily Ferguson, Ashley A. Pallathra, Leila Bateman, Samantha Plate, Meredith Cola, Juhi Pandey, Edward S. Brodkin, Robert T. Schultz, Birkan Tunç


Abstract
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition characterized by impaired social communication and the presence of restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviors and interests. Prior research suggests that restricted patterns of behavior in ASD may be cross-domain phenomena that are evident in a variety of modalities. Computational studies of language in ASD provide support for the existence of an underlying dimension of restriction that emerges during a conversation. Similar evidence exists for restricted patterns of facial movement. Using tools from computational linguistics, computer vision, and information theory, this study tests whether cognitive-motor restriction can be detected across multiple behavioral domains in adults with ASD during a naturalistic conversation. Our methods identify restricted behavioral patterns, as measured by entropy in word use and mouth movement. Results suggest that adults with ASD produce significantly less diverse mouth movements and words than neurotypical adults, with an increased reliance on repeated patterns in both domains. The diversity values of the two domains are not significantly correlated, suggesting that they provide complementary information.
Anthology ID:
W18-0616
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: From Keyboard to Clinic
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, LA
Editors:
Kate Loveys, Kate Niederhoffer, Emily Prud’hommeaux, Rebecca Resnik, Philip Resnik
Venue:
CLPsych
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
147–157
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-0616
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-0616
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Julia Parish-Morris, Evangelos Sariyanidi, Casey Zampella, G. Keith Bartley, Emily Ferguson, Ashley A. Pallathra, Leila Bateman, Samantha Plate, Meredith Cola, Juhi Pandey, Edward S. Brodkin, Robert T. Schultz, and Birkan Tunç. 2018. Oral-Motor and Lexical Diversity During Naturalistic Conversations in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: From Keyboard to Clinic, pages 147–157, New Orleans, LA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Oral-Motor and Lexical Diversity During Naturalistic Conversations in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (Parish-Morris et al., CLPsych 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-0616.pdf