Temporal Stability of Semantic Predictions in Subclinical Autistic and Schizotypal Personality Traits

Background and Hypothesis:Language impairments are core symptoms of both schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorders and have been linked to deficits in predictive language processing. While altered use of semantic predictions have been reported in both disorders, little is known whether semantic predictions are stable over time. We therefore investigated the temporal stability of semantic predictions in individuals with schizotypal and autistic traits.Study Design:115 participants, assessed for schizotypal and autistic traits, completed an auditory stability paradigm across two time points. In the first session, participants listened to 240 sentence beginnings varying in predictability (e.g., low: “The swimmer jumped into the…”; high: “The child hid the toy under the…”) and provided a prediction for each sentence final word. In the follow-up sessions, 240 new sentences were intermixed. In addition to final-word predictions, sentence and prediction recall were assessed to examine the influence of memory on prediction stability.Study Results:Generalized linear mixed models revealed that higher predictability led to greater temporal stability of semantic predictions. Importantly, increasing schizotypal and autistic traits were associated with reduced stability, particularly in highly predictable contexts where stable predictions typically facilitate efficient language processing. While poorer sentence recall was linked to greater instability, especially in medium- and low-predictability contexts, it did not account for the reduced stability observed in relation to schizotypal and autistic traits. Conclusions:These findings suggest that individuals with higher schizotypal and autistic traits struggle to form stable, lasting semantic predictions, which may contribute to difficulties in efficient language processing.Key words: Language Processing, Predictive Processing, SSD, ASD