Parent-child interactions play an important role in typically-developing children (TYP)’s language development (Huttenlocher et al., 2010). This has also been found for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) (Siller & Sigman, 2002, 2008). Parents of TYP children and parents of children with ASD have been found to be similar in terms of the language input they provide to their children during general daily activities (Warren et al., 2010). Extending these findings to the context of reading, for TYP children, amount of exposure to shared storybook reading predicts vocabulary (Deckner et al., 2006; Fletcher et al., 2008). However, parents vary the styles in which read to their children (Hammett et al., 2003). Adding meaningful dialogue to reading activities predicts expressive vocabulary growth beyond simply reading (Whitehurst et al., 1988). Specifically, parent utterances that promote reflection on language are pertinent for child vocabulary development (Deckner et al., 2006; Fletcher et al., 2008).
Objectives:
This study examined a novel question: similarities and differences in language input provided to children during shared storybook reading by parents of children with ASD and parents of TYP children. Secondly, we investigated if parent input variables are related to child vocabulary in each group.
Methods:
Parent-child dyads including twenty-five typically-developing toddlers and fifteen children with ASD participated. During the first and third visits of a three-part longitudinal study, parents filled out the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventories (MCDI) (Fenson et al., 2007). During the second visit dyads were videotaped while reading the same storybook and the interaction was transcribed. Parent utterances were analyzed for linguistic variables (MLU and lexical diversity) and coded into three categories according to input added: reading, non-language-related and language-related, with the last category subdivided as labeling, responses to child, and elaborative utterances.
Results:
Group differences in parent language input were analyzed and correlations were calculated between parent language variables and child vocabulary. Similarities: There were no significant group differences in the number of reading utterances, non-language-related utterances, or in lexical diversity. Differences: Parents of TYP children labeled more, had more responses to child, used more elaborative utterances and had longer MLUs. For TYP children, initial vocabulary was negatively correlated with parents’ labeling and elaborative utterances 6 months later. For the ASD group, there were no significant correlations. Analysis of relationships between parent language and final child vocabulary will be available by May 2012.
Conclusions:
Parents of children with ASD and parents of TYP children differ in some aspects of their language during shared storybook reading. Specifically, parents of TYP children add more language-related utterances to the activity, perhaps because their children were more interested in these asides. In the TYP group parents were influenced by their child’s earlier vocabulary; they produced fewer language-related utterances for higher child vocabulary, suggesting that elaborations may have been used to facilitate language development in children with less language. However, no such relationship was found for parents of children with ASD.
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