Measuring idiosyncratic interests in children with autism

Abstract

A defining symptom of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is the presence of re-stricted and repetitive activities and inter-ests, which can surface in language as a perseverative focus on idiosyncratic top-ics. In this paper, we use semantic similarity measures to identify such idiosyn-cratic topics in narratives produced by children with and without ASD. We find that neurotypical children tend to use the same words and semantic concepts when retelling the same narrative, while chil-dren with ASD, even when producing ac-curate retellings, use different words and concepts relative not only to neurotypical children but also to other children with ASD. Our results indicate that children with ASD not only stray from the target topic but do so in idiosyncratic ways ac-cording to their own restricted interests.