“Uh” and “um” in autism: The case of hesitation marker usage in Dutch-speaking autistic preschoolers

English-speaking autistic children use the hesitation marker “um” less often than non-autistic children while they use “uh” at a similar rate. It is unclear why this is the case. We examined hesitation marker usage of Dutch-speaking autistic and non-autistic preschoolers with the aim to 1) make a crosslinguistic comparison of hesitation marker usage and 2) examine two hypotheses regarding the underlying linguistic mechanisms of hesitation markers: the symptom hypothesis and the signal hypothesis. We replicated group differences in “um” usage and showed significant effects of age and biological... Mehr ...