Maternal Language Input During Social Play Contexts Among Children with Autism and Typically-Developing Children

• In Event: The Role of Early Social Scaffolding in Atypical Development.

Abstract

Introduction:
Early language input during social play provides young children with critical learning moments (CITES). Young children benefit from such linguistic social scaffolding - research has documented the link to early cognitive, social-emotional, and language development (CITE). While patterns of parental language input among typically developing (TD) dyads have been well-studied, work among parents of children with developmental disabilities has received far less attention. Though some researchers have looked at the amount of early language input during parent-child interaction between ASD and language-matched TD dyads, the results are mixed. While some studies have reported group differences in language input, such as parents of ASD children making more direct statements, calling their child’s name more, and speaking more than parents of TD children, other studies have reported no group differences (Bang & Nadig, 2013; Venuti et al., 2012; Wolchik, 1983). The present study aims to measure maternal language input through syntactic complexity – such as mean length of utterances and number of words – which have been linked to vocabulary and communication development among ASD children (Bang & Nadig, 2013; Fusaroli et al., 2019). The present study recorded and transcribed maternal language input to characterize linguistic input during a mother-child play session among ASD and age-matched TD mother-child dyads and examined the group similarities and differences in early linguistic experiences.

Methods:
38 English-speaking mother-child dyads participated in the present study: 19 ASD dyads (M = 44.6 months, SD = 13.7 months, 14 males, 5 females) and 19 age- and gender-matched TD dyads (M = 44.6 months, SD = 13.9 months). All ASD children had previous diagnoses of ASD and all TD children were self-reported by their parents to have no history of intellectual, cognitive, or other developmental disabilities or delays. All dyads participated in a 320-second mother-child play session featuring eight unique toy objects at a child-sized table in a lab environment and maternal speech was recorded and transcribed by trained research assistants.
Maternal speech was analyzed using the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT) software (Miller & Iglesias, 2015) for the number of utterances, mean length of utterances (MLU), the number of different words (NDW), the number of total words (NTW), and type-token ratio (NDW divided by NTW). Group comparisons of these variables were analyzed via independent group t-tests.

Results:
Parents of TD children had significantly more utterances (p = .042) and higher MLU (p = .047), NDW (p < .001), and NTW (p = 0.004) than parents of ASD children. No significant group difference emerged for the type-token ratio (p = .623).

Conclusion
The present study documents similarities and differences in syntactic complexity, which have been previously linked to language and communication development among young children, between mothers of ASD children and TD children during a social play context. Notably, mothers of TD children demonstrated significantly greater syntactic complexity than mothers of ASD children. The findings provide further evidence for the development and implementation of parent-mediated ASD interventions that target this specific linguistic scaffolding process during play to promote early development.

Authors

• Elizabeth Susan Perkovich, University of Houston
  Presenting Author

• Hanako Yoshida, University of Houston