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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10063 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10063/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [BERTopic: Neural topic modeling with a class-based TF-IDF procedure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05794/) (2022)
- [SMHD: A Large-Scale Resource for Exploring Online Language Usage for Multiple Mental Health Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05258/) (2018)
- [CARMA: Comprehensive Automatically-annotated Reddit Mental Health Dataset for Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.03102/) (2025)
- [Parameter-Efficient Token Embedding Editing for Clinical Class-Level Unlearning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19302/) (2026)
- [MindSET: Advancing Mental Health Benchmarking through Large-Scale Social Media Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20672/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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 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.