How children and parents collaborate to negotiate meaning: Studies on language acquisition in autism

Collaborative activities between children and their parents provide a unique context for all forms of cultural learning, including children's emerging social understanding and the creation and use of linguistic symbols. My dissertation focuses on the linkage between parent-child play interactions and children's social/communicative development. To investigate these issues, I have conducted a series of cross-sectional and longitudinal studies on young children with autism and their parents. Study 1 evaluated the behaviors that parents of children with autism show during early toy play, particularly the extent to which parental behaviors were synchronized with children's focus of attention and ongoing activity. This study had two major findings. First, parents of children with autism (N=18) synchronized their behaviors to their children's attention and activities as much as parents of children with developmental delay and parents of typically developing children, matched on language capacities. Second, parents of children with autism (N=21) who showed higher levels of synchronization during initial play interactions had children who developed superior joint attention and language over a period of one, ten and 16 years than children of parents who showed lower levels of synchronization initially. Study 2 used modern methods for analyzing longitudinal data (i.e., mixed models) to (a) replicate the longitudinal link between parental synchronization and gains in children's linguistic abilities, and (b) integrate these findings with other studies suggesting that language gains in autism are also predicted by early variation in joint attention behaviors (Sigman & Ruskin, 1999). Study 2 included 28 preschoolers with autism whose language abilities were evaluated annually over a period of 4 years. Results showed that the rate of children's language growth was independently predicted by (a) children's responsiveness to others' bids for joint attention, and (b) the parents' responsiveness to their children's attention and activity during early play interactions (parental synchronization). Both predictive relations could not be explained by initial variation in global developmental characteristics such as IQ, mental age, or language abilities. These findings comport nicely with a social-pragmatic view on language acquisition which emphasizes the collaborative nature in which children and their parents negotiate meaning.