@inproceedings{mankarious-etal-2026-mirroring,
    title = "Mirroring Minds: Asymmetric Linguistic Accommodation and Diagnostic Identity in {ADHD} and Autism {R}eddit Communities",
    author = "Mankarious, Saad  and
      Zeid, Nour  and
      Ait Hou, Iyad  and
      Hwa, Rebecca  and
      Zirikly, Ayah",
    editor = "Zirikly, Aya  and
      Bar, Kfir  and
      MacAvaney, Sean  and
      Ireland, Molly  and
      Ophir, Yaakov  and
      Atzil-Slonim, Dana  and
      Varadarajan, Vasudha  and
      Bedrick, Steven  and
      Desmet, Bart",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology ({CLP}sych 2026)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.clpsych-1.23/",
    pages = "282--297",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-421-7",
    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 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 the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) dictionary. 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. 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."
}