Abstract
Previous work has demonstrated that patterns of social attention hold predictive value for language development in typically developing infants. The goal of this research was to explore how patterns of attention in autistic, language delayed, and typically developing children relate to early word learning and language abilities. We tracked patterns of eye movements to faces and objects while children watched videos of a woman teaching them a series of new words. Subsequent test trials measured participants‘ recognition of these novel word-object pairings. Results indicated that greater attention to the speaker‘s mouth was related to higher scores on standardized measures of language development for autistic and typically developing children (but not for language delayed children). This effect was mediated by age for typically developing, but not autistic children. When effects of age were controlled for, attention to the mouth among language delayed participants was negatively correlated with standardized measures of language learning. Attention to the speaker‘s mouth and eyes while she was teaching the new words was also predictive of faster recognition of those words among autistic children. These results suggest that language delays among children with autism may be driven in part by aberrant social attention, and that the mechanisms underlying these delays may differ from those in language delayed participants without autism.
Highlights
Autism is a disorder marked by diminished attention to social information and is often associated with significant language impairment (American Psychiatric Association, 2013)
Research supporting a social pragmatic account of word learning suggests that children who are sensitive to these social cues in infancy demonstrate superior language skills later in development (Carpenter et al, 1998; Morales et al, 2000; Brooks and Meltzoff, 2005, 2008; Mundy et al, 2007)
This study explored the relations between attention to word learning stimuli, recognition of the newly learned word within the task, and standardized measures of language ability among autistic, language delayed, and typically developing children
Summary
Autism is a disorder marked by diminished attention to social information and is often associated with significant language impairment (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). While many potential word learning situations are quite ambiguous (Medina et al, 2011), the highly informative encounters, when they do occur, are likely to help bootstrap language learning In these highly informative contexts, children have much to gain from attending to social cues. One way for a child to successfully encode a new label for an object would be to coordinate her attention with a speaker, interpret the speaker’s intent to label, isolate the label, and crucially, identify the referent for that label Integration of this information would require attention to a number of social cues.
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