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

Smooth engagement in conversation is crucial for social interactions, yet little is known about typical and atypical development of turn-taking abilities. We rely on 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). Children with autism responded 189ms faster on average than typically developing children – contrary to prior studies – due to higher speech overlapping. 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, show that latencies in autism might be lower than in typical development and situate turn-taking into fine-grained developmental and interpersonal contexts.