| Children with autism appear to be quite compromised in the ability to achieve core developmental tasks (initiating and responding to bids for joint attention, and the mergence of receptive and expressive language) that are typically achieved by the 2nd year of life in most children. By definition, children with autism fail to develop verbal language in a typical manner. There is evidence that children with autism also fail to initiate and respond to bids for joint attention. There are few studies that have longitudinally assessed the development of expressive language and joint attention in children with autism. The purpose of this study was to investigate the observation that the ability to jointly attend to external stimuli is related to the onset of spoken words. This study included five children with a prior diagnosis of autism, with ages ranging from 20 to 40 months, and three typical children, age 8-30 months. Participants completed three play sessions across a 6-month period to assess initiation of joint attention. Participants' parents completed the MCDI questionnaire 6 times across a 6-month period to assess the development of receptive and expressive language.;Results suggest that children with autism do not have to follow the typical course of development in order for expressive language to emerge. While typical children first develop joint attention followed by expressive language, two of the children in this study followed the typical course of development and two of the children developed expressive language prior to the onset of joint attention. Future research should focus on the use of a larger sample size across a longer duration of time, in order to allow for greater generalizability of findings. |
