Articulatory entrainment, the adaptation of vocal tract coordination to facilitate interaction remains underexplored in spontaneous dialogue, particularly among autistic speakers.
Many prior studies have utilized task-based, phoneme-level analyses with invasive measurement techniques.
Here, we introduce a speaker-independent framework to quantify articulatory entrainment in spontaneous dyadic conversations among autistic and non-autistic adults using acoustic-to-articulatory inversion and coordination complexity metrics.
We examine temporal changes in articulatory coordination across interaction.
Non-autistic dyads exhibit increasing coordination complexity and stronger entrainment over time, autistic dyads show moderate effects, and mixed dyads demonstrate the least alignment.
Greater articulatory entrainment correlates with higher self-reported conversational success, indicating increase in coordination complexity as a marker of effective social interaction.