Dialogic Priming and Dynamic Resonance in Autism: Creativity Competing with Engagement in Chinese Children with ASD.

Researchers studied how children with autism use language creatively during conversations compared to typically developing children. They found that while both groups could build on what others said, children with autism had to choose between being creative with language or staying engaged socially - they couldn't do both at the same time. Typically developing children could be creative and socially engaged simultaneously during conversations.

This study examined dialogic priming and engagement in naturalistic Mandarin conversations between typically developing children and children with ASD. Using mixed effects linear regression analysis on balanced corpora, researchers found that dialogic priming significantly correlated with engagement and creative reuse of input in both groups. However, a key difference emerged: in children with ASD, creativity and intersubjective engagement were in competition with each other, whereas neurotypical children showed no such competition. This suggests children with ASD have relatively impeded ability to creatively recombine priming input during real-time dialogic interactions, highlighting potential differences in language processing and social communication dynamics.

Findings suggest speech-language interventions should address the apparent trade-off between creativity and engagement in ASD. Therapeutic approaches might focus on supporting simultaneous creative language use and social engagement rather than treating these as separate skills.

Sample size not reported, limiting generalizability. Study focused only on Mandarin-speaking children, restricting cross-linguistic applicability. Methodology details are unclear from the abstract, making replication difficult.

A growing body of research has focused on the relationship between priming and engagement through dialogue (e.g. Tantucci and Wang in Appl Linguist 43(1):115-146, 2022; Mikulincer et al. in Cognit Emotion 25:519-531, 2011). The present study addresses this issue also in relation to creativity and provides a new applied model to measure intersubjective engagement in ASD vs neurotypical populations' speech. We compared two balanced corpora of naturalistic Mandarin interaction of typically developing children and children diagnosed with ASD (cf.

Zhou and Zhang in Xueqian jiaoyu yanjiu [Stud Preschool Educ] 6:72-84, 2020). We fitted a mixed effects linear regression showing that, in both neurotypical and ASD populations, dialogic priming significantly correlates with engagement and with whether the child could creatively re-use the original input to produce a new construction. What we found is that creativity and intersubjective engagement are in competition in children with ASD in contrast with the neurotypical population. This finding points to a relatively impeded ability in ASD to re-combine creatively a priming input during the here-and-now of a dialogic event.