Project Summary
Difficulties with pragmatic (i.e., social) language are a highly clinically significant feature of autism spectrum
disorder (ASD) that can impose a significant burden on autistic individuals throughout the lifespan. Strong
evidence suggests that pragmatic language can also be subtly impacted among clinically unaffected first-degree
relatives, constituting a principal feature of the broad autism phenotype (BAP) believed to reflect ASD-related
genetic influence. Understanding the causes of pragmatic difficulties in ASD is therefore critically important for
improving clinical care (e.g., by tailoring interventions to target underlying mechanistic factors), and for informing
gene-brain-behavior connections. Importantly, research on pragmatic language in ASD has primarily focused on
English speakers, and no studies have examined the pragmatic language features of the BAP cross-linguistically.
Because pragmatic language is fundamentally cultural, understanding how pragmatic profiles, and their
mechanistic underpinnings, might differ across languages and cultures is critical, especially in increasingly
multilingual societies (including the US). In this proposal, our multidisciplinary international team of investigators
will employ an armamentarium of cutting-edge analytic platforms and innovative deep behavioral and targeted
neural phenotyping methods to delineate similarities and differences in pragmatic language profiles in ASD and
the BAP, across speakers of Cantonese and English. By examining how pragmatic profiles may differentially
express in these two typologically distinct languages (including how pitch processing and related pragmatic
language mechanisms differ across speakers of tone and non-tone languages), analyses will provide insights
into the complex biological and environmental influences on ASD pragmatic profiles. Our prior work and new
preliminary data strongly indicate that neuro-auditory, speech rhythmic, and articulatory contributors to pragmatic
language are robustly impacted in both Cantonese- and English-speaking ASD groups, supporting our
hypothesis that core pragmatic features are subserved by fundamental and biologically deep mechanistic
processes with strong genetic etiology. Using a family-study design, this project will not only comprehensively
characterize pragmatic language profiles across speakers of Cantonese and English, but importantly, also examine
the mechanistic underpinnings of these pragmatic language profiles that may be common across languages, or
language-specific. Further, complementary light phenotyping is applied in tandem with machine-learning data-
driven analyses, including natural language processing, in a larger verification sample. Findings will highlight both
those pragmatic features under strong biological influence, as well as those that are potentially more malleable to
environmental influences, such as linguistic structure and cultural features.
