Neuro-identity mixing impacts linguistic accommodation and regularisation: evidence from autistic and allistic interactions

Linguistic accommodation is the process by which people make their language more like that of their interlocutor, and has been argued to contribute to language change. However, it is unclear to what extent people of different neurotypes accommodate, or how neurotype mixing -- which has been shown to reduce communicative success -- impacts linguistic accommodation. In this paper, we build on previous research which uses artificial language learning to investigate accommodation as a mechanism for linguistic regularisation (i.e., the reduction of variation in a grammatical system). We test the impact of neurotype mixing on accommodation, with the aim of better understanding whether such mixing impacts processes of language change. Our results suggest that both allistic and autistic participants accommodate less and retain less of the variant when in mixed-neurotype pairs, but that this effect is more pronounced in autistic people. We discuss the importance of these results with respect to the Double Empathy theory of mixed-neurotype communication and language evolution.