An experimental study of word learning in minimally verbal children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: When children hear a novel word, they tend to associate it with a novel rather than a familiar object. The ability to map a novel word to its corresponding referent is thought to depend, at least in part, on language-learning strategies, such as mutual exclusivity and lexical contrast. Although the importance of word learning strategies has been broadly investigated in typically developing children as well as younger children with autism spectrum disorder, who are usually language delayed, there is a paucity of research on such strategies and their role in language learning in school-age children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder who have failed to develop fluent speech. In this study, we examined the ability of minimally verbal children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder to learn and retain novel words in an experimental task, as well as the cognitive, language, and social correlates of these abilities. We were primarily interested in the characteristics that differentiated between three subgroups of participants: those unable to use word learning strategies, particularly mutual exclusivity, to learn novel words; those able to learn novel words over several exposure trials but not able retain them; and those able to retain the words they learned. METHODS: Participants were 29 minimally verbal individuals with autism spectrum disorder from 5 to 17 years of age. Participants completed a computerized touchscreen novel-word-learning procedure followed by assessments of immediate retention and of delayed retention, two hours later. Participants were grouped according to whether they passed/failed at least 7 of 8 (binomial p<.035) novel word learning trials and 7 of 8 immediate or delayed retention trials, and were compared on measures of nonverbal IQ, receptive and expressive vocabulary, phonological processing, joint attention and symptom severity. RESULTS: Of 29 participants, 14 failed both learning and immediate retention, 8 passed learning but failed immediate retention, and 7 passed both learning and immediate retention. Group performance was highly similar for delayed retention. Language level, particularly expressive vocabulary, differentiated between participants who did and did not succeed in retention, even while controlling for differences in nonverbal IQ. CONCLUSIONS: The ability of minimally verbal school-age children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder to identify the referents of novel words was associated with nonverbal cognitive abilities. Retention of words was associated with concurrent expressive language abilities. IMPLICATIONS: Our findings of associations between the retention of novel words acquired in a lab-based experimental task and concurrent language ability warrants further investigation with larger samples and longitudinal research designs, which may support the incorporation of contrastive word learning strategies into language learning interventions for severely language-impaired individuals with autism spectrum disorder.

Do you have a question for me? How children with Williams syndrome respond to ambiguous referential communication during a joint activity.

Research on language in individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) has been fueled by persistent theoretical controversies for two decades. These shifted from initial focus on dissociations between language and cognition functions, to examining the paradox of socio-communicative impairments despite high sociability and relatively proficient expressive language. We investigated possible sources of communicative difficulties in WS in a collaborative referential communication game. Five- to thirteen-year-old children with WS were compared to verbal mental age- and to chronological age-matched typically developing children in their ability to consider different types of information to select a speaker's intended referent from an array of items. Significant group differences in attention deployment to object locations, and in the number and types of clarification requests, indicated the use of less efficient and less mature strategies for reference resolution in WS than expected based on mental age, despite learning effects similar to those of the comparison groups, shown as the game progressed.

Model syndromes for investigating social cognitive and affective neuroscience: a comparison of Autism and Williams syndrome.

Autism and Williams syndrome are genetically based neurodevelopmental disorders that present strikingly different social phenotypes. Autism involves fundamental impairments in social reciprocity and communication, whereas people with Williams syndrome are highly sociable and engaging. This article reviews the behavioral and neuroimaging literature that has explored the neurocognitive mechanisms that underlie these contrasting social phenotypes, focusing on studies of face processing. The article concludes with a discussion of how the social phenotypes of both syndromes may be characterized by impaired connectivity between the amygdala and other critical regions in the 'social brain'.

Social-perceptual abilities in adolescents and adults with Williams syndrome.

People with Williams syndrome (WMS) have a unique social phenotype characterised by unusually strong interest in other people and an engaging and empathic personality. Two experiments were designed to test whether this phenotype is associated with relatively spared abilities to decode mental-state information from nonverbal cues. The first experiment involved a modified version of the revised Eyes Test. The second experiment probed the ability to label emotions from brief dynamic facial displays. Adolescents and adults with WMS were compared to age-, IQ-, and language-matched participants with learning/intellectual disabilities, and age-matched normal controls. In both experiments the WMS group performed at a significantly lower level than the normal controls, and no different from the well-matched comparison-group with intellectual disabilities. These findings, contradicting earlier reports in the literature, argue against the view that in WMS social-perceptual abilities are relatively spared and can explain the social profile associated with this neurodevelopmental disorder.