We evaluated how children with autism make linguistic adjustments when talking with someone else. We devised two novel measures to assess (a) overall conversational linkage and (b) utterance-by-utterance resonance within dialogue between an adult and matched participants with and without autism (n = 12 per group). Participants with autism were less able to establish "cognitive linkage" with an interlocutor. As predicted, only among children with autism was there a positive correlation between the ability to link in with "speaker's meanings" and ratings of emotional connectedness with the conversational partner. Participants with autism were "not" less likely to show a basic form of dialogic resonance across successive utterances (the "frame grab"), but more often elaborated their responses in an atypical manner. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)