23112
Joint Attention and Language in Children with ASD and Typical Development
Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) exhibit language impairments when compared to their typically developing (TD) peers (APA, 2013; Tager-Flusberg, 2000). Children with ASD tend to develop language along an atypical pattern often acquiring expressive language before receptive language (Charman, 2003). Preliminary research suggests that joint attention serves as protective factor against language impairments in children with ASD (Bates, 1979; Charman, 2003; Mundy, Sigman, & Kasari, 1990). Mundy and Gomes (1998) found that the initiation of joint attention uniquely related to expressive language while responsivity to joint attention related to receptive language. In children with ASD, joint attention significantly correlated with expressive and receptive language (Charman, 2003). Murray et al. (2008) found that responsivity to joint attention uniquely related to receptive language. The language children gain in moments of joint attention may represent an important factor for social and cognitive development for children with ASD.
Objectives:
The purpose of our study was to examine language ability profiles in relation to children’s joint attention skills during a parent-child reading task. We hypothesized children with ASD who engaged in increased moments of joint attention would display receptive language abilities similar to their TD peers.
Methods:
Our analysis included 85 children ages 3:1 to 6:11 and their parents. Forty-five children were diagnosed with ASD and forty were typically developing. Subjects were recruited from local preschools, elementary schools, and autism treatment clinics. Language ability was assessed by the Differential Ability Scale-II (Elliot, 2007) and joint attention was assessed through a coded parent child reading task (Vo, 2011).
Results:
A mediation analysis was conducted using PROCESS (Hayes, 2013) to examine the indirect effects of developmental status on receptive language ability through joint attention. Developmental status significantly correlated with receptive language, r = -.328, p = .002, but not expressive language, r = -.155, p = .156. Developmental status negatively related to joint attention, t(85)= -3.852, p < .001) and significantly predicted receptive language ability while controlling for developmental status (t(85)= 3.004 p = .004). The direct effect of status on receptive language ability while controlling for joint attention, t(85)= -1.877, p = .064) represented a trend toward significance. The Sobel test (zab =-2.32, p = .02) supports joint attention as a mediator between developmental status and receptive language ability; however, a bootstrap confidence interval (95%) using 1,000 bootstrap samples (-12.87, 0.38) included zero. Therefore, these results may not support that the full mediation, but nonetheless provide data for further implications of the relation between joint attention and language development in children with ASD.
Conclusions:
The acquisition of joint attention skills is a significant predictor of language development in children with ASD. Our results support past findings regarding the complexity of language ability in children (Tager-Flusberg, 2000). In terms of language profiles, joint attention is uniquely related to receptive language. More specifically, these results support the role of joint attention to support receptive language development in children with ASD.