How set switching affects the use of context-appropriate language by autistic and neuro-typical children.

Louise Malkin,Kirsten Abbot-Smith

doi:10.1177/13623613211012860

Louise Malkin, Kirsten Abbot-Smith

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613211012860

Copy DOI

Abstract

The way autistic individuals use language often gives the impression that they are not considering how much information listeners need in a given context. The same child can give too much information in one context (e.g. saying 'the big cup' with only one cup present) and too little information in another context (e.g. entering a room and announcing 'the red one' when the listener has no prior knowledge regarding what this refers to). We asked whether many autistic children particularly struggle to tailor their language appropriately in situations where this means changing how they have previously described something. That is, if a speaker has recently described an object as 'the cup', the need to switch to describing it as 'the big cup' could hinder the speaker's ability to use language in a context-appropriate way. We found that switching descriptions indeed makes it more difficult for children to use language in a context-appropriate way, but that this effect did not play out differently for autistic versus neuro-typical children. Autistic children were, however, less likely to provide a context-appropriate amount of information overall than were neuro-typical peers. The combination of these effects meant that when object re-description was required, autistic children only produced an appropriate description half the time. In contrast, without a requirement to re-describe, autistic children could indeed take listener informational needs into account. Applied professionals should consider whether a requirement to change the way the child has previously said something may hinder a child's ability to communicate effectively.

Highlights

Two key diagnostic criteria for autism are, first, impairments in social communications and, second, difficulties with adapting behaviour to particular contexts
We confirm that this does have a detrimental effect in both NT and autistic children; we found a main effect for our experimental switching manipulation
This ties in with our finding that on the very first trial, the autistic group was more over-informative than NT peers

Summary

Introduction

Two key diagnostic criteria for autism are, first, impairments in social communications and, second, difficulties with adapting behaviour to particular contexts. No study has focussed on how the requirement to switch referring terms impacts appropriate use of referring expressions by NT children or adults We explored this question by creating the following experimental paradigm. For both conditions for each trial, children had to identify one animal (out of two) to an adult addressee, and in both conditions, this required an evaluation of the visual context (i.e. which animal the target was paired with) to be appropriately informative. In both conditions, for half the trials, the participant needed to use a simple referring expression We asked whether usage of appropriately informative referring expressions by autistic children – and by NT children – would be detrimentally affected by the requirement to switch the referring term used for a particular animal

Participants

Procedure

Findings

Discussion