Parents' talk about conceptual categories with infants: stability, variability, and implications for expressive language development.

Children's exposure to talk about conceptual categories plays a powerful role in shaping their conceptual development. However, it remains unclear when parents begin to talk about categories with young children and whether such talk relates to children's language skills. This study examines relations between parents' talk about conceptual categories and infants' expressive language development. Forty-seven parent-infant dyads were videotaped playing together at child age 10, 12, 14, and 16 months. Transcripts of interactions were analyzed to identify parents' talk about conceptual categories. Children's expressive language development was assessed at 18 months. Findings indicate that parents indeed talked about conceptual categories with infants and that talk was stable across time, with college-educated parents producing more than non-college-educated parents. Further, parents' talk about conceptual categories between 10 and 16 months predicted children's 18-month expressive language. This study sheds new light on mechanisms through which early experiences may support children's language development.

Say that again: Quantifying patterns of production for children with autism using recurrence analysis.

The current research study characterized syntactic productivity across a range of 5-year-old children with autism and explored the degree to which this productivity was associated with standardized measures of language and autism symptomatology. Natural language samples were transcribed from play-based interactions between a clinician and participants with an autism diagnosis. Speech samples were parsed for grammatical morphemes and were used to generate measures of MLU and total number of utterances. We applied categorical recurrence quantification analysis, a technique used to quantify patterns of repetition in behaviors, to the children's noun-related and verb-related speech. Recurrence metrics captured the degree to which children repeated specific lexical/grammatical units (i.e., recurrence rate) and the degree to which children repeated combinations of lexical/grammatical units (i.e., percent determinism). Findings indicated that beyond capturing patterns shown in traditional linguistic analysis, recurrence can reveal differences in the speech productions of children with autism spectrum disorder at the lexical and grammatical levels. We also found that the degree of repeating noun-related units and grammatical units was related to MLU and ADOS Severity Score, while the degree of repeating unit combinations (e.g., saying "the big fluffy dog" or the determiner-adjective-adjective-noun construction multiple times), in general, was only related to MLU.

It takes all kinds (of information) to learn a language: Investigating the language comprehension of typical children and children with autism.

What factors influence children's understanding of language, in both typical and atypical development? In this article, I summarize findings from the Longitudinal Study of Early Language (LSEL), which has been following the talk, understanding, and interactions of typically developing (TD) children and children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The LSEL has found group similarities in syntactic understanding and word learning strategies, but also within-group variability that correlates with other aspects of the children's behavior. In particular, early linguistic knowledge and social abilities are both shown to play independent roles in later talk and understanding. Thus, theoretical perspectives that highlight social vs. linguistic underpinnings to language development should be viewed as complementary rather than competing.

Early Word Order Usage in Preschool Mandarin-Speaking Typical Children and Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Influences of Caregiver Input?

This study explores the emergence and productivity of word order usage in Mandarin-speaking typically-developing (TD) children and children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and examines how this emergence relates to frequency of use in caregiver input. Forty-two caregiver-child dyads participated in video-recorded 30-min semi-structured play sessions. Eleven children with ASD were matched with 10 20-month-old TD children and another 11 children with ASD were matched with 10 26-month-old TD children, on expressive language. We report four major findings: (1) Preschool Mandarin-speaking children with ASD produced word order structures with pervasive ellipsis at similar rates to language-matched TD children, but also displayed differences from TD children in their usage of SVt and VtO frames; (2) Grammatical productivity was observed in both TD children and children with ASD; moreover, children with ASD with higher expressive language produced less stereotyped language; (3) Both TD children and children with ASD heard a range of word orders in their caregivers' input, with TD children's input greater in amount and complexity; however, caregivers of both groups also showed no age/language-related changes in word order usage; (4) Few word-order-specific correlations emerged between caregivers and their children; however, strong correlations were observed for mean length of utterances (MLU) for both groups: Caregivers who produced longer/more complex utterances had children who did the same. Taken together, it seems that despite their pragmatic deficits, the early grammatical knowledge of word order in Mandarin-exposed children with ASD is well preserved and in general follows the typical developmental pattern. Moreover, caregiver input is broadly rather than finely tuned to the linguistic development of TD children and children with ASD, and plays a more important role in children's general syntactic development than in specific word order acquisition. Thus, early word order usage in preschool Mandarin-speaking TD children and children with ASD may be influenced by both caregiver input and child abilities.

What categorical induction variability reveals about typical and atypical development.

Categorical induction abilities are robust in typically developing (TD) preschoolers, while children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) frequently perform inconsistently on tasks asking for the transference of traits from a known category member to a new example based on shared category membership. Here, TD five-year-olds and six-year-olds with ASD participated in a categorical induction task; the TD children performed significantly better and more consistently than the children with ASD. Concurrent verbal and nonverbal tests were not significant correlates; however, the TD children's shape bias performance at two years of age was significantly positively predictive of categorical induction performance at age five. The shape bias, the tendency to extend a novel label to other objects of the same shape during word learning, appears linked with categorical induction ability in TD children, suggesting a common underlying skill and consistent developmental trajectory. Word learning and categorical induction appear uncoupled in children with ASD.

Phonetic discrimination mediates the relationship between auditory brainstem response stability and syntactic performance.

Syntactic, lexical, and phonological/phonetic knowledge are vital aspects of macro level language ability. Prior research has predominantly focused on environmental or cortical sources of individual differences in these areas; however, a growing literature suggests an auditory brainstem contribution to language performance in both typically developing (TD) populations and children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This study investigates whether one aspect of auditory brainstem responses (ABRs), neural response stability, which is a metric reflecting trial-by-trial consistency in the neural encoding of sound, can predict syntactic, lexical, and phonetic performance in TD and ASD school-aged children. Pooling across children with ASD and TD, results showed that higher neural stability in response to the syllable /da/ was associated with better phonetic discrimination, and with better syntactic performance on a standardized measure. Furthermore, phonetic discrimination was a successful mediator of the relationship between neural stability and syntactic performance. This study supports the growing body of literature that stable subcortical neural encoding of sound is important for successful language performance.

Online Processing of Subject-Verb-Object Order in a Diverse Sample of Mandarin-Exposed Preschool Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Grammatical comprehension remains a strength in English-exposed young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), yet limited research has investigated how preschool children with ASD process grammatical structures in real time, in any language. Using the eye-movement measures of Intermodal Preferential Looking, we assessed online processing of subject-verb-object (SVO) order in seventy 2- to 5-year-old children with ASD exposed to Mandarin Chinese across the spectrum, whose vocabulary production scores were dramatically delayed compared with the typical controls. With this Mandarin-exposed sample, we tested the extent to which children with ASD require (a) highly consistent input and/or (b) good discourse/pragmatics for acquiring grammatical structures. Children viewed side-by-side videos depicting reversible actions (e.g., a bird pushing a horse vs. a horse pushing a bird), and heard an audio matching only one of those actions; their eyegaze to each video was coded and analyzed. Both typically developing children and children with ASD demonstrated comprehension of SVO word order, suggesting that core grammatical structures such as basic word order may be preserved in children with ASD across languages despite radical differences in language environment, social/pragmatic abilities, and neurological organization. However, children with ASD were less efficient in online sentence processing than typical children, and the efficiency of their online sentence processing was related to their standardized language assessment scores. Of note is that across both Mandarin Chinese and English, some proportion of minimally verbal children with ASD exhibited SVO comprehension despite their profoundly impaired expressive language skills. Autism Res 2019, 12: 1829-1844. © 2019 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: Grammar is a strength in the language comprehension of young English learners with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Eye-movement data from a diverse sample of Chinese preschoolers with ASD indicated similar grammatical strength of basic word order in Chinese (e.g., to understand sentences like "The bird is pushing the horse"). Moreover, children's proficiency of sentence processing was related to their language assessment scores. Across languages, such knowledge is even spared in some minimally verbal children with ASD.

The Shape Bias in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Potential Sources of Individual Differences.

Purpose: Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate many mechanisms of lexical acquisition that support language in typical development; however, 1 notable exception is the shape bias. The bases of these children's difficulties with the shape bias are not well understood, and the current study explored potential sources of individual differences from the perspectives of both attentional and conceptual accounts of the shape bias. Method: Shape bias performance from the dataset of Potrzeba, Fein, and Naigles (2015) was analyzed, including 33 children with typical development (M = 20 months; SD = 1.6), 15 children with ASD with high verbal abilities (M = 33 months; SD = 4.6), and 14 children with ASD with low verbal abilities (M = 33 months; SD = 6.6). Lexical predictors (shape-side noun percentage from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory; Fenson et al., 2007) and social-pragmatic predictors (joint attention duration during play sessions) were considered as predictors of subsequent shape bias performance. Results: For children in the low verbal ASD group, initiation of joint attention (positively) and passive attention (negatively) predicted subsequent shape bias performance, controlling for initial language and developmental level. Proportion of child's known nouns with shape-defined properties correlated negatively with shape bias performance in the high verbal ASD group but did not reach significance in regression models. Conclusions: These findings suggest that no single account sufficiently explains the observed individual differences in shape bias performance in children with ASD. Nonetheless, these findings break new ground in highlighting the role of social communicative interactions as integral to understanding specific language outcomes (i.e., the shape bias) in children with ASD, especially those with low verbal abilities, and point to new hypotheses concerning the linguistic content of these interactions. Presentation Video: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.7299581.

Uneven Expressive Language Development in Mandarin-Exposed Preschool Children with ASD: Comparing Vocabulary, Grammar, and the Decontextualized Use of Language via the PCDI-Toddler Form.

Data from children with ASD who are learning Indo-European languages indicate that (a) they vary hugely in their expressive language skills and (b) their pragmatic/socially-based language is more impaired than their structural language. We investigate whether similar patterns of language development exist for Mandarin-exposed children with ASD. Parent report data of the Putonghua Communicative Development Inventory-Toddler Form were collected from 160 17-83-month-old children with ASD. These children with ASD demonstrated similar levels of variability as Western children with ASD. In particular, they could be divided into three distinct subgroups (high verbal, middle verbal, low verbal), all of which manifested relative strengths in lexical and grammatical language compared to pragmatic usage of decontextualized language.

Dense home-based recordings reveal typical and atypical development of tense/aspect in a child with delayed language development.

Studies investigating the development of tense/aspect in children with developmental disorders have focused on production frequency and/or relied on short spontaneous speech samples. How children with developmental disorders use future forms/constructions is also unknown. The current study expands this literature by examining frequency, consistency, and productivity of past, present, and future usage, using the Speechome Recorder, which enables collection of dense, longitudinal audio-video recordings of children's speech. Samples were collected longitudinally in a child who was previously diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, but at the time of the study exhibited only language delay [Audrey], and a typically developing child [Cleo]. While Audrey was comparable to Cleo in frequency and productivity of tense/aspect use, she was atypical in her consistency and production of an unattested future form. Examining additional measures of densely collected speech samples may reveal subtle atypicalities that are missed when relying on only few typical measures of acquisition.

Grammatical Language Impairment in Autism Spectrum Disorder: Exploring Language Phenotypes Beyond Standardized Testing.

Linguistic and cognitive abilities manifest huge heterogeneity in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Some children present with commensurate language and cognitive abilities, while others show more variable patterns of development. Using spontaneous language samples, we investigate the presence and extent of grammatical language impairment in a heterogeneous sample of children with ASD. Findings from our sample suggest that children with ASD can be categorized into three meaningful subgroups: those with normal language, those with marked difficulty in grammatical production but relatively intact vocabulary, and those with more globally low language abilities. These findings support the use of sensitive assessment measures to evaluate language in autism, as well as the utility of within-disorder comparisons, in order to comprehensively define the various cognitive and linguistic phenotypes in this heterogeneous disorder.

'Form is easy, meaning is hard' revisited: (re) characterizing the strengths and weaknesses of language in children with autism spectrum disorder.

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate impairments in social interaction and communication, and in repetitive/stereotypical behaviors. The degree to which children with ASD also manifest impairments in structural language-such as lexicon and grammar-is currently quite controversial. We reframe this controversy in terms of Naigles' (Naigles, Cognition 2002, 86: 157-199) 'form is easy, meaning is hard' thesis, and propose that the social difficulties of children with ASD will lead the meaning-related components of their language to be relatively more impaired than the form-related components. Our review of the extant literature supports this proposal, with studies (1) reporting that children with ASD demonstrate significant challenges in the areas of pragmatics and lexical/semantic organization and (2) highlighting their good performance on grammatical assessments ranging from wh-questions to reflexive pronouns. Studies on children with ASD who might have a co-morbid grammatical impairment are discussed in light of the absence of relevant lexical-semantic data from the same children. Most importantly, we present direct comparisons of assessments of lexical/semantic organization and grammatical knowledge from the same children from our laboratory, all of which find more children at a given age demonstrating grammatical knowledge than semantic organization. We conclude with a call for additional research in which in-depth grammatical knowledge and detailed semantic organization are assessed in the same children. WIREs Cogn Sci 2017, 8:e1438. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1438 This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Language Acquisition Linguistics > Language in Mind and Brain Neuroscience > Development.

Neural correlates of language variability in preschool-aged boys with autism spectrum disorder.

Children with autism vary widely in their language abilities, yet the neural correlates of this language variability remain unclear, especially early in development. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) was used to examine diffusivity measures along the length of 18 major fiber tracts in 104 preschool-aged boys with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The boys were assigned to subgroups according to their level of language development (Low: no/low language, Middle: small vocabulary, High: large vocabulary and grammar), based on their raw scores on the expressive language (EL) and receptive language (RL) sections of the Mullen Scales of Early Learning (MSEL). Results indicate that the subgroups differed in fractional anisotropy (FA), mean diffusivity (MD), and radial diffusivity (RD) along the inferior longitudinal fasciculus (ILF) in both hemispheres. Moreover, FA correlated significantly with Mullen EL and RL raw scores, but not ADOS severity score, along the left and right ILF. Subgroups also differed in MD (but not FA) along the left superior longitudinal fasiculus and left corticospinal tract, but these differences were not correlated with language scores. These findings suggest that white matter microstructure in the left and right ILF varies in relation to lexical development in young males with ASD. The findings also support the use of raw scores on language-relevant standardized tests for assessing early language-brain relationships. Autism Res 2017. © 2017 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Autism Res 2017, 10: 1107-1119. © 2017 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

"Didn't I just say that?" Comparing parent report and spontaneous speech as indicators of grammatical development.

BACKGROUND: The Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales use parental report to examine communication and social skills in children with typical and atypical development, and exhibit high reliability when compared against overall direct testing. However, findings are mixed comparing Vineland communication/language scores with experimenter-administered tests of language. METHODS: The current study breaks new ground in comparing Vineland reports with direct observation of children's speech by (a) individual items and (b) level of child functioning, focusing on usage of wh-questions, verb tenses, negation, pronouns and noun-verb combinations. Both 'high-verbal' (HV) and 'middle-verbal' (MV) children with ASD are included, as well as a language-matched TD group. RESULTS: The results revealed that parent report on the Vineland varies in accuracy of capturing the production of grammatical items by young children with ASD and TD children. While parents' assessment of their child's production of noun-verb combinations and 'who/why' was highly accurate, children's production of pronouns was under-rated by parents. Additionally, parents of HV children also under-rated their child's production of past regular verbs. CONCLUSION: Underestimation of these grammatical elements could lead to mistaken conclusions about their development in ASD or in individual children.

Category structure and processing in 6-year-old children with autism.

This study investigated the categorization abilities of 6-year-old children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) as compared to their peers with typical development (TD) using a category verification task. We examined the impact of stimulus typicality on multiple aspects of real-time performance, including accuracy, reaction time, and performance stability. Both groups were more accurate in identifying typical category members than atypical ones; however, only the ASD group's accuracy was affected by item ordering, indicating less stable performance. Furthermore, category structure was predicted by concurrent language levels in the TD group but by concurrent nonverbal IQ in the ASD group; these latter two findings suggest that children with ASD process categories differently than their peers with TD. Autism Res 2017, 10: 327-336. © 2016 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

"You're telling me!" The Prevalence and Predictors of Pronoun Reversals in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders and Typical Development.

Social and linguistic explanations have been proposed for pronoun reversals in young typically developing (TD) children and those with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The current study breaks new ground in investigating both explanations, comparing 18 TD toddlers and 15 children with ASD at similar language levels. Spontaneous speech was sampled every four months for six visits. Vocabulary and joint attention were also measured. Both groups produced pronoun reversals at low rates. The ASD group produced somewhat more reversals than the TD group, overall and at multiple visits. In the ASD group, early language and joint attention scores contributed significantly and independently to the incidence of reversal. Both linguistic and social factors seem implicated; moreover, reversals seem to occur when children's language and social abilities develop asynchronously. These findings can help clinicians devise both linguistic and social interventions for the relevant children.

Grammatical aspect is a strength in the language comprehension of young children with autism spectrum disorder.

PURPOSE: The comprehension of tense/aspect morphology by children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) was assessed via Intermodal Preferential Looking (IPL) to determine whether this population's difficulties with producing these morphemes extended to their comprehension. METHOD: Four-year-old participants were assessed twice, 4 months apart. They viewed a video that presented side-by-side ongoing and completed events paired with familiar verbs with past tense and progressive morphology. Their eye movements were recorded and coded offline; the IPL measures included percentage of looking time at, and latency of first look to, the matching scene. Spontaneous speech samples were also obtained and coded for number of words, past tense, and progressive inflections. RESULTS: Relative to their baseline preferences, these 4-year-old children with ASD looked more quickly to and longer at the matching scene for both morphemes. Children who produced more words, including progressive and past morphemes, and those who performed better on standardized language assessments demonstrated better comprehension of -ing. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, these children with ASD demonstrated consistent comprehension of grammatical aspect morphology; moreover, their degree of comprehension was found to correlate with spontaneous production and standardized test scores.

Input and language development in children with autism.

The social deficits associated with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have been implicated in the language delays and deficits of children with ASD. Consequently, the extent to which children with ASD utilize their language-related interactions and input in the same ways as typically developing children is only just beginning to be investigated. The current article summarizes the role of input for typically developing children learning language, and then reviews in some detail recent studies demonstrating influential effects of maternal responsivity (e.g., following in on children's focus of attention) and aspects of maternal speech (e.g., word frequency, word diversity, structural complexity) on the language production and comprehension of young children with ASD. Maternal responsivity appears to play a particularly influential role with children who are minimally verbal whereas the content and structure of maternal speech facilitate language in children who are already verbal.