Mirroring Minds: Asymmetric Linguistic Accommodation and Diagnostic Identity in ADHD and Autism Reddit Communities

TL;DR

This study examines how ADHD and autism communities on Reddit adapt their language when interacting, revealing asymmetric linguistic shifts and exploring the influence of diagnosis disclosure on communication styles.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of intergroup linguistic accommodation between neurodivergent communities, grounded in Communication Accommodation Theory, with empirical evidence from Reddit data.

Findings

Communities maintain distinct linguistic profiles that shift when members engage across groups.

Linguistic features tend to converge in cross-community interactions, indicating accommodation.

Diagnosis disclosure has small, sometimes opposite, effects on linguistic style compared to intergroup shifts.

Abstract

Social media research on mental health has focused predominantly on detecting and diagnosing conditions at the individual level. In this work, we shift attention to \emph{intergroup} behavior, examining how two prominent neurodivergent communities, ADHD and autism, adjust their language when engaging with each other on Reddit. Grounded in Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT), we first establish that each community maintains a distinct linguistic profile as measured by Language Inquiry and Word Count Lexicon (LIWC). We then show that these profiles shift in opposite directions when users cross community boundaries: features that are elevated in one group's home community decrease when its members post in the other group's space, and vice versa, consistent with convergent accommodation. The involvement of topic-independent summary variables (Authentic, Clout) in these shifts provides partial evidence against a purely topical explanation. Finally, in an exploratory longitudinal analysis around the moment of public diagnosis disclosure, we find that its effects on linguistic style are small and, in some cases, directionally opposite to cross-community accommodation, providing initial evidence that situational audience adaptation and longer-term identity processes may involve different mechanisms. Our findings contribute to understanding intergroup communication dynamics among neurodivergent populations online and carry implications for community moderation and clinical perspectives on these conditions.