Gaze-Speech Coordination During Narration in Autism Spectrum Disorder and First-Degree Relatives

Background/Objectives: Narrative differences in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and subtle and parallel differences among their first-degree relatives suggest potential genetic liability to this critical social-communication skill. Effective social-communication relies on coordinating signals across modalities, which is often disrupted in ASD. Therefore, the current study examined the coordination of fundamental skills—gaze and speech—as a potential mechanism underlying narrative and broader pragmatic differences in ASD and their first-degree relatives. Methods: Participants included 35 autistic individuals, 41 non-autistic individuals, 90 parents of autistic individuals, and 34 parents of non-autistic individuals. Participants narrated a wordless picture book presented on an eye-tracker, with gaze and speech simultaneously recorded and subsequently coded. Time series analyses quantified their temporal coordination (i.e., the temporal lead of gaze to speech) and content coordination (i.e., the amount of gaze-speech content correspondence). These metrics were then compared between autistic and non-autistic groups and between parent groups and examined in relation to narrative quality and conversational pragmatic language skills. Results: Autistic individuals showed reduced temporal coordination but increased content coordination relative to non-autistic individuals with no significant differences found between parent groups. In both autistic individuals, and parent groups combined, increased content coordination and reduced temporal coordination were linked to reduced narrative quality and pragmatic language skills, respectively. Conclusions: Reduced temporal and increased content coordination may reflect a localized strategy of labeling items upon visualization. This pattern may indicate more limited visual, linguistic, and cognitive processing and underlie differences in higher-level social-communicative abilities in ASD. To our knowledge, this study is the first to identify multimodal skill coordination as a potential mechanism contributing to higher-level social-communicative differences in ASD and first-degree relatives, implicating mechanism-based interventions to support pragmatic language skills in ASD.