International Meeting for Autism Research (London, May 15-17, 2008): Maternal rate of speaking predicts later language in children with ASD

Saturday, May 17, 2008

Champagne Terrace/Bordeaux (Novotel London West)

J. Karaja , University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT

L. D. Swensen , Infant Development, NYS Institute for Basic Research in Developmental Disabilities, Staten Island, NY

G. Jaffery , Psychology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT

D. Fein , Psychoogy, University of Connecticut

L. Naigles , Psychology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT

Background: Both lexical and grammatical elements of maternal input have been found to predict subsequent child language in ASD and in typical development. Maternal clarity of speech has also been hypothesized to facilitate language development, by reducing the complexity of the acoustic signal and thereby the child’s task of segmenting the speech stream. Research with typically developing children, and with children who stutter, has found that maternal slowness and clarity of speech correlates positively with child fluency and child speech perception (Ratner, 2004; Liu, Kuhl & Tsao, 2003).

Objectives: The current study investigates whether maternal rate of speaking influences language development in children with autism.

Methods: 10 boys with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) were studied longitudinally between 33-45 months of age. Every four months, mother-child dyads participated in 15 minute free play sessions, which were transcribed and analyzed. Mothers’ language production was coded at Visit 2 and children’s language production was coded at Visit 3.

Results: Mothers’ and children’s speech was coded for mean speed of utterance (seconds per morpheme) and IPSyn score, a measure of grammatical complexity. Pairwise correlations revealed that children who spoke more slowly produced utterances of lower grammatical complexity (r = -.67, p = .03). However, mothers who spoke more slowly at Visit 2 had children who used utterances of greater grammatical complexity at Visit 3 (r = .688, p = .03). These correlations held even when children’s overall cognitive abilities (Mullen scores) were partialed out.

Conclusions: These results support previous findings with other populations, that maternal clarity of speech influences child language development. Specifically, mothers who spoke more slowly had children who appeared more grammatically advanced. Thus, children with autism appear to learn from maternal speech in ways similar to typically developing children.

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