Autistic Traits and Characteristics of Turn-Taking: An Analysis of Corpus of Everyday Japanese Conversation

Abstract

The communication characteristics of adults and children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have been studied in terms of turn-taking time and prosodic features. However, there are few studies that analyze conversations from the perspective that autistic traits exist on a continuum across the entire population to varying degrees. In this study, we investigated turn-taking and backchanneling characteristics of participants with high and low levels of autistic traits using the Corpus of Everyday Japanese Conversation (CEJC). The results showed that individuals with stronger autistic traits exhibited longer turn-taking gaps, whereas those with weaker autistic traits produced backchannels more frequently in response to their interlocutors.