Adult-Supported Intention-Reading in Children with High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders

Background:

Children with autism demonstrate joint attention (JA) and mindreading deficits (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985; Wetherby et al., 2004). The confluence of JA and mindreading is intention-reading: the ability to identify what communicative partners are attending to (referential intention) and why (social intention) (Tomasello, 2008). Intention-reading is fundamental to everyday interactions, making it a potentially powerful indicator of social-communication impairments in children with autism.

In everyday social interactions, adults typically manipulate common ground (i.e., knowledge and information shared by communicative partners), which supports/ “scaffolds” children’s performance. Scaffolding is arguably required to assess how young children perform in dynamic social exchanges, rather than what they know about social interactions as measured by a static, standardized test. The purpose of this poster is to evaluate the effectiveness of scaffolding in supporting intention-reading in children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (CHFASD).

Objectives:

I. To examine scaffolding in CHFASD:

1. Is scaffolding effective in eliciting improved intention-reading responses from CHFASD?
2. Are more scaffolds required to elicit improved responses in younger as compared to older children?

II. To compare scaffolding in CHFASD and children with typical development (CTD) :

1. Do CTD demonstrate better scaffolded intention-reading performance than CHFASD?
2. Are more scaffolds required to elicit improved responses in CHFASD than CTD?

Methods:

Six children, aged 6;5 to 7;7 (years; months) with an autism spectrum disorder and age-appropriate language and cognition, individually participated in an art activity with the experimenter. The art activity created common ground, which the child used to read the experimenter’s intentions. The experimental task’s nine opportunities were interspersed throughout the art activity, each posing two questions: “What did I look at?” (targeting referential intentions), and “What am I thinking?” (targeting social intentions). In each opportunity, the experimenter used JA to communicate one social function: (1) requesting, (2) informing, or (3) sharing emotions. Each function was targeted three times. When participants did not provide complete responses, the experimenter provided verbal and nonverbal prompts to elicit additional information.

Each opportunity was transcribed and coded for the number and nature (verbal/nonverbal) of experimenter scaffolds and informativeness of child responses. Both participants’ unprompted and scaffolded responses were coded, and performance was compared. Similar procedures were used to analyze scaffolds and child responses for CTD in the same age range, who previously participated in the same task (Greenslade & Coggins, 2011). Amount of scaffolding and scaffolded performance were compared across groups.

Results:

1. Scaffolded responses of CHFASD were more informative than unprompted responses.
2. Younger CHFASD required more scaffolds to provide improved responses than older CHFASD.
3. There was no difference between the scaffolded performance of CTD and CHFASD.
4. Overall, more scaffolds were not required to elicit improved responses in CHFASD than CTD. However, younger CHFASD required more scaffolds than CTD.

Conclusions:

These results support the effectiveness of scaffolding in improving intention-reading in CHFASD. Future research will refine the present task and scaffolding procedures. If construct validity is confirmed, this measure may prove useful in identifying social-communication impairments in CHFASD.