A Multimodal Approach To Develop Expressive Language And Pragmatics In Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Author : Beth Davidoff
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (15 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Characteristics of the Spoken Language Interactions of Young Beginning Communicators with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Their Mothers written by Beth Davidoff and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This descriptive research study investigated the characteristics of the spoken language interactions of 13 mother-child dyads including children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) during daily interactions at home. The children ranged in age from 26 to 76 months of age, and all had language abilities that ranged from no spoken words to early spoken word combinations. Three main research questions were addressed: (1) What are the general characteristics of the utterances children with ASD and their mothers are observed to produce? (2) What are the semantic-syntactic characteristics of the spoken words children with ASD and their mothers are observed to produce, and children are reported by mothers to produce and understand? (3) Is there a relationship between the words a child with ASD produces and the words his/her mother produces, such that the dyad produces a common set of spoken words (a shared lexicon)? Mothers made digital audio recordings of daily interactions with their children during typical activities at home. Sixty minutes of these interactions per dyad were transcribed and analyzed. Mothers completed a parent report questionnaire on their childrens receptive and expressive vocabulary. There was considerable variability across children and mothers on all language measures, which varied by the childrens phase of spoken language development. The five children at the Intentional/Presymbolic phase produced substantially more unintelligible than intelligible utterances, expressed less than five spoken word types and less than 20 word tokens in a 20-minute natural language sample, and obtained age equivalent language production scores below 15 months per parent report. The six children at the First Words phase produced more intelligible utterances, although they also produced many unintelligible utterances. They generally produced five or more word types and 20 word tokens but less than 30 spoken word types per 20-minute natural language sample and obtained age equivalent language production scores between approximately 15 and 24 months per parent report. The two children at the Word Combinations phase produced more intelligible utterances than the other children, and produced fewer unintelligible utterances. They expressed more than 30 spoken word types in a 20-minute natural language sample, but less than 92 different word types in 65 utterances. They had mean lengths of utterance in morphemes between 1.2 and 1.7 and they obtained age equivalent language scores that were at approximately the 24-month level. Children at all phases of spoken language development were reported to understand more words than they were reported to produce. During their 60-minute interaction, each mother-child dyad produced a shared lexicon of words (i.e., words that were produced by both the child and the mother), ranging from two to more than 100; the dyads shared lexicons increased in size as the childrens spoken language development level increased. The shared lexicons of the dyads with children at the presymbolic phase included words that related to social/interaction and action word types, while those of the dyads with children at the symbolic phases shared words across all word semantic/syntactic word types (social/interactive, noun, action/state, descriptive, closed class). The frequency of words produced by the mothers, and mother and child imitation were related to the shared lexicons. The results support the social-interactionist theories of language development; specifically, that mothers provide scaffolds including frequent word tokens, semantic and temporal contingency to child utterances, and attunement to their childrens level of spoken language development. The receptive and expressive vocabularies of the children were consistent with those of children with other developmental disabilities and younger children with typical language development as reported in the literature. The results of this study suggest that imitation may play a role in the shared lexicon of the children and their mothers. Imitation by mothers and their children may play an important role in language learning for children with ASD. This hypothesis proposes an alternative view of immediate echolalia (i.e., a childs repetition of all or part of another persons speech) than that traditionally proposed. Furthermore, results suggest that vocabulary targets for children with ASD at these early phases of spoken language development should be selected from the words that caregivers use with their children during spontaneous daily interactions rather than from core vocabulary lists. Results suggest that frequency of maternal words also facilitates language learning. Another important strategy for intervention may be to increase the number of times new words are presented to children with ASD within the language interactions of mothers and other communication partners. For those beginning communicators with ASD who are not yet producing spoken language, the use of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) may be considered. Future directions for research include replication of the current study with additional participants, and using video to capture the nonlinguistic context, gestures, and unaided communication in the dyads interactions. The results of this research would inform the development of interventions with caregivers to support the spoken language development of their children with ASD who are beginning communicators. Future studies should investigate the effects of such intervention.