Bossy and nice requests: Varying language register in speakers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD)

The ability to vary language style or register is important for successfully navigating social situations. For example, we speak differently to our boss than we do to our children. This project examined whether high-functioning speakers with ASD were able to vary the language used for requests along continua of “politeness/bossiness”, whether any such adjustments were similar to those made by appropriately matched controls, and whether speakers with ASD were able to accurately interpret politeness/bossiness registers.High-functioning children and adolescents (aged 6–16) with ASD were compared to matched typically developing children and adolescents on ability to (1) produce both “nice” and “bossy” requests to puppet listeners and, (2) to judge which of two requests was more polite. Contrary to expectations, participants with ASD were as adept as controls in both producing and judging polite and bossy requests. These results suggest that, at least for high-functioning children and adolescents with ASD, some skill at adjusting language register exists in their repertoire. Future research should examine whether this skill is also present in younger children and in unstructured interactions. If these results hold, clinicians may be able to focus their intervention on teaching strategies for successful use of behaviours that already exist rather than training the responses themselves.Learning outcomes: The reader will become familiar with the functional importance of varying language registers or style according to situational demands. In addition, teaching a strategy for how to determine when a particular language behaviour should be used may sometimes be more effective than training the specific language response.