Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous research has demonstrated that speakers changephonetic forms in response to variability in their immediatelinguistic milieu, such that they converge with an interlocutor.While much is known about the impact of social dynamics onthis process, the impact of individual variability in cognitionand perception is less well-explored. The present study seeksto examine the impact of these individual differences onphonetic convergence during a naturalistic conversation,comparing convergence in autism spectrum disorder (ASD)and typical development. Results showed a small effect oftemporal convergence within typically developing dyads,compared with evidence of divergence within ASD dyads.While preliminary, this pattern of results suggests that socialmotivation may play a more important role in phoneticconvergence than sensory accounts (such as self-monitoring).