The Influence of Maternal Speech on the Expressive Language Production of Young Children with ASD

Background: Maternal responsiveness is associated with a number of positive outcomes for both children with typical development and children with ASD. For children with ASD, mothers’ use of language that follows the child’s focus of attention and is non-demanding has been linked to child language gains over time. However, many interventions that make use of demanding language (i.e., prompting) have also been found to promote expressive language use in children with ASD. Differences in findings across these contexts may be due to differences in interaction partner (parent v. therapist) or outcome measure (in-session language use vs. long-term language gains).

Objectives: This study examined the relationship between mothers’ responsive language use and the expressive language production of children with ASD during a play interaction. To examine the nature of maternal speech in more detail, responsiveness was broken up into two dimensions (relationship to child’s focus of attention and demandingess) and categorized based on other important language dimensions, such as use of orienting cues and prompt type.

Methods: Participants in this study were twenty-three children with ASD aged 2 to 7 years and their mothers. Each dyad participated in a 10-minute videotaped play interaction. To examine what types of maternal language promote child language production, instances of maternal language that occurred immediately preceding instances of child language were compared to instances of maternal language that occurred immediately preceding pre-determined control points within the same interaction.

Results: Preliminary results indicate that maternal language related to the child’s current focus of attention and maternal language that required a verbal or behavioral response from the child were significantly more likely to precede instances of child language than control points. In particular, maternal language that both followed the child’s focus of attention and demanded a behavioral response was significantly more likely to precede instances of child language than were other types of maternal language.

Conclusions:  Overall, these results suggest that maternal language that both follows the child’s focus of attention and places a behavioral demand on the child is most likely to promote expressive language production in young children with ASD during mother-child interactions.