Effect of social and semantic cues on word learning in children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder : a preliminary study

Abstract

Most children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have difficulty mapping novel phonological forms to novel referents. It was hypothesized that their social communication impairment and reduced attention to object shapes may hinder their vocabulary development. This study compared the effect of social cues using pointing together with eye gaze and semantic cues using gestures that depicted object shapes on word identification and production in high-functioning children with ASD. Seven 3-to-6-year-old ASD children with normal non-verbal intelligence, 7 age-matched, 7 language-matched and 7 receptive-vocabulary-matched typically developing (TD) children learned 3 pairs of novel words from story-reading using social cues, semantic cues, and no cue. Participants’ abilities to identify and label the novel objects in trained and untrained exemplars in pictures were measured immediately and a week after learning. Likely due to the small sample size, there was no statistical difference in word learning in ASD children using the three cues and ASD children did not perform differently from TD children. However, consistent patterns in the mean accuracy in ASD children suggested that pointing with eye gaze may facilitate word identification, whereas shape gestures may impede their word learning. Future studies with larger sample size are required to confirm these observations.