Rethinking Social Communication Support: Exploring Communication Partner Training for Autistic Adults and Their Neurotypical Communication Partners
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Autistic and neurotypical people often have difficulty communicating effectively with one another and understanding each other's experiences. Despite evidence that communication breakdowns occur at the interactional level, most social communication interventions focus only on behaviors to be changed by autistic adults, and rely heavily on teaching neurotypical social skills. In this Perspective, we draw on our experiences as a mixed-neurotype team of clinicians, researchers, and advocates to argue that a new framework for social communication support is needed. Specifically, we propose that communication partner training (CPT), an umbrella term for programs that teach strategies to people with communication differences and communication partners alike, is an appropriate framework to guide future social communication support for autistic adults and their neurotypical communication partners. We provide an overview of how CPT is currently used with adults with acquired communication differences (e.g., aphasia, traumatic brain injury) and their communication partners. We highlight three key components of such programs: (i) promoting increased knowledge and understanding of communication differences and each person's unique communication profile; (ii) adapting the communication environment; (iii) and identifying collaborative strategies that people with communication differences and their communication partners can use to foster meaningful interactions. We acknowledge that there are important fundamental differences between autistic adults and people with acquired communication differences; however, we propose that CPT can be used to inform social communication support for autistic adults and their neurotypical communication partners. We provide recommendations for future CPT program development within autism research. Some recommendations include the need to acknowledge each person's intersecting identities and the dynamic impact of intrinsic and extrinsic factors on communication. We also recommend future research to explore ways that CPT can be applied to newly diagnosed autistic adults, as well as autistic youth, and their communication partners. Finally, we highlight the importance of foregrounding future program development in the lived experience of autistic adults and their communication partners. Community brief: We hope that our recommendations will encourage researchers and clinicians to codevelop new social communication supports to improve communication success for autistic adults and their neurotypical communication partners.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".