23897
The Development of Early Gesture-Speech Combinations in Infants at High Risk for Autism Spectrum Disorder
Children use gestures to communicate before producing speech in the first year of life (Bates, 1976). Beginning around 14-22 months of age, children start to produce gestures with speech, conveying a sentence-like meaning (Butcher & Goldin-Meadow, 2000). For instance, a child may point to a bottle and say, “want,” communicating that s/he wants a bottle. Importantly, early gesture-speech combinations are related to language skills in typical and atypical populations (Rowe, Ozcaliskan, & Goldin-Meadow; 2008). One specific population, who show deficits in gestures, is children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). For example, Winder et al. (2013) found that infant siblings of children with ASD, who are at high risk for ASD (hereafter, “high-risk”), produce fewer gesture-speech combinations than low risk peers with no family history of ASD at 13 and 18 months. While much work has focused on exploring early gesture use in ASD, little research exists on gesture-speech combinations in high-risk infants.
Objectives:
The purpose of the present study is to expand on previous studies to examine the development of gesture-speech combinations in high-risk infants who were later diagnosed with ASD (HRA+), unaffected high-risk infants (HRA-), and unaffected low risk controls (LRC) at 12 and 18 months. Specifically, we addressed the following research questions (RQ): (1) Do HRA+, HRA-, and LRC infants show differences in gesture-speech combinations at 12 and 18 months? (2) Do early gesture-speech combinations predict infants’ later language skills and/or ASD outcomes?
Methods:
73 mother-child dyads engaged in a free play for 10 minutes in the lab at 12 and 18 months (nHRA+ = 18, nHRA- = 25, nLRC = 30). Following the coding scheme developed by Özçalışkan and Goldin-Meadow (2009), we transcribed gesture and speech from videotaped sessions. We converted frequency variables to rates per 10 minutes. At 12 and 18 months, we administered receptive and expressive language subscales from Mullen and combined raw scores to calculate language scores. Also, we administered ADOS to assess infants’ ASD diagnoses at 36 months. Based on ADOS and final clinical judgment, infants were categorized as HRA+, HRA-, and LRC.
Results:
RQ1: At 12 months, HRA+ infants produced significantly lower rate of gesture-speech combinations than HRA- infants (χ2 = 6.36, p = 0.012) and LRC infants (χ2 = 4.14, p = 0.042). At 18 months, HRA+ children produced significantly lower rate of gesture-speech combinations than LRC children (χ2 = 6.863, p = 0.009). RQ2: Gesture-speech combinations rate predicted infants’ language scores at both 12 and 18 months in combined HRA group (p12-months = 0.001, R2 = 0.23; p18-months = 0.02, R2 = 0.13), but not LRC group. Finally, total gestures rate (with or without speech) at 12 months predicted high-risk infants’ ASD outcomes at 36 months, when controlling for 12-month language scores (z = -2.31, p = 0.021, R2= 0.18).
Conclusions:
HRA+ infants produced significantly fewer gesture-speech combinations, compared to HRA- and LRC infants at 12 and 18 months. These results provide further evidence for differences in early gesture-speech combinations that predict language skills in young children.