Social Context Matters for Turn-Taking Dynamics: A Comparative Study of Autistic and Typically Developing Children

Engaging in fluent conversation is a surprisingly complex task that requires interactantsto promptly respond to each other in a way that is appropriate to the social context. Inthis study, we disentangled different dimensions of turn-taking by investigating how thedynamics of child-adult interactions changed according to the activity (task-oriented versusfreer conversation) and the familiarity of the interlocutor (familiar versus unfamiliar).Twenty-eight autistic children (16 male; Mage = 10.8 years) and 20 age-matched typicallydeveloping children (8 male; Mage = 9.6) participated in seven task-orientated face-to-faceconversations with their caregivers (336 total conversations) and seven more telephoneconversations alternately with their caregivers (144 total conversations, 60 with typicaldevelopment group) and an experimenter (191 total conversations, 112 with autismgroup). By modelling inter-turn response latencies in multi-level Bayesian location-scale models to include long tails, we found good test-rest reliability across sessions andcontexts, and showed that context strongly shaped group differences in response latencies.Autistic children exhibited more overlaps, produced faster response latencies and shorterpauses than than typically developing children – and these group differences were strongerwhen conversing with the unfamiliar experimenter. Unfamiliarity also made the relationbetween individual differences and latencies evident: only in conversations with theexperimenter were higher socio-cognitive skills, lower social motivation and lower socialawareness associated with faster responses. Information flow and shared tempo were alsoinfluenced by familiarity: children adapted their response latencies to the predictabilityand tempo of their interlocutor’s turn, but only when interacting with their caregiversand not the experimenter. These results highlight the need to construe turn-taking asa multicomponential construct that is shaped by individual differences, interpersonaldynamics, and the affordances of the context.