The development of turn-taking skills in typical development and autism

Social interaction depends on turn-taking and adapting to one's conversational partner, yet little is known about typical and atypical development of these abilities. We investigated this in a longitudinal corpus of spontaneous speech in 64 parent-child dyads: 32 typically developing children (20.27 months at start, 6 girls, 24 white) and 32 with autism (linguistically matched, 32.76 months, 4 girls, 31 white). Contrary to prior studies, children with autism responded 189ms faster on average than typically developing children, due to more overlapping speech. Latency decreased in both groups (47-78ms every 4 months) and depended on individual differences in socio-cognitive, linguistic, and motor skills, which for autism explained all variance by age. Both groups equally adapted their tempo to their interlocutors. With robust conceptualization and modeling techniques, we highlight the importance of overlapping speech, show that latencies in autism might be faster than in typical development and situate turn-taking into fine-grained developmental and interpersonal contexts.