Abstract
Despite the fact that individuals on the autism spectrum are perceived as awkward and lacking in social skills by typically developing(TD) peers, actual conversational difficulty in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is less monolithic than previously thought. High functioning children with autism(HFA) have comparative success implementing syntactic and phonological rules, but unlike their TD peers struggle mostly with pragmatics (Baron-Cohen 1999). For example, in an interview setting, a child with ASD may struggle to generate utterances that involve both themselves and their interviewee such as, “I used to live in Boston too, but now I live in New York. Have you ever been to New York?”This study seeks to answer the following research questions: In conversation, are ASD kids responding to questions and generating them at a similar rate to TD peers?How appropriate are questions and responses between groups?How does the content of the responses and generated questions affect the conversation?Who speaks the most during an interview? Is it the interviewer (the child), or the interviewee?\r Consistent with my hypothesis, autistic children generated more information in their conversations, and spoke longer than typically developing peers.These results indicate that autistic children are attempting engagement in conversation, but that engagement is perceived as egocentric, and irrelevant, which can lead to bullying and further limits socio-linguistic skills.