J Autism Dev Disord (2014) 44:1478–1482 DOI 10.1007/s10803-013-1994-5
BRIEF REPORT
Brief Report: Do Children with Autism Gather Information from Social Contexts to Aid Their Word Learning? Wei Jing • Junming Fang
Published online: 15 November 2013 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Abstract Typically developing (TD) infants could capitalize on social eye gaze and social contexts to aid word learning. Although children with autism disorder (AD) are known to exhibit atypicality in word learning via social eye gaze, their ability to utilize social contexts for word learning is not well understood. We investigated whether verbal AD children exhibit word learning ability via social contextual cues by late childhood. We found that AD children, unlike TD controls, failed to infer the speaker’s referential intention through information gathered from the social context. This suggests that TD children can learn words in diverse social pragmatic contexts in as early as toddlerhood whereas AD children are still unable to do so by late childhood. Keywords Autism disorder Social contexts Word learning Late childhood
Introduction The emergentist coalition model suggests that social cues utilized for word learning include social eye gaze and social contexts (Hollich et al. 2000). As a substantial body of evidence has demonstrated, typically developing (TD) infants by 18 months can utilize adults’ eye gaze to guide W. Jing (&) College of Education, Shaanxi Normal University, 199 South Chang’an Road, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China e-mail: [email protected] J. Fang Department of Preschool and Special Education, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China e-mail: [email protected]
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word learning (Baldwin 1993; Briganti and Cohen 2011; Hollich et al. 2000; Houston-Price et al. 2006). They can also capitalize on social contexts to infer adults’ referential intention when social eye gaze is absent or uninformative (Akhtar et al. 1996; Diesendruck et al. 2004; Tomasello et al. 1996). The inability of children with autism to engage in word learning via eye gaze has been widely demonstrated in the literature (Akechi et al. 2011; Baron-Cohen et al. 1997; Gliga et al. 2012; Parish-Morris et al. 2007; Preisslera and Carey 2005). To date, however, only Parish-Morris et al. (2007) have investigated AD children’s word learning via reading intention within certain social contexts. The study by Parish-Morris et al. (2007) seems to offer clear evidence that AD children are unable to learn words via social contextual cues. However, three methodological limitations within the study necessitate reconsideration of their findings. First, there is evidence that AD children have significant developmental improvement in theory of mind ability, which is primarily related to the children’s language abilities (Steele et al. 2003). Therefore, the AD preschoolers in Parish-Morris et al.’s (2007) study were likely too young a sample for the study to obtain any positive findings. Second, their study presented six toys in one trial, which imposed high cognitive demands on the participants. This could have been confounded with the children’s deficits in general cognitive processes, such as memory, thereby influencing the performance of word learning via social contexts. Finally, as the adults’ referential intention was inferred via their expressions, body language, and linguistic cues in that study, AD children’s impairments in social pragmatic and language skills (Tager-Flusberg 2004; Tager-Flusberg et al. 2005) might have prevented AD children from succeeding in their task. Therefore, similar to Akhtar et al.’s study (1996), referential intention was inferred from the momentary absence of the adult in the present experiment.
J Autism Dev Disord (2014) 44:1478–1482
In Akhtar et al.’s (1996) study, young children were required to make use of discourse pragmatics and the speaker’s experience and point of view to determine the intended referent of a novel word. However, Samuelson and Smith’s (1998) study provided three reasons to question whether the successful word learning in Akhtar et al.’s study (1996) was due to understanding adults’ referential intention based on social contextual cues or to simple associative learning relied on basic attention and memory processes. First, children in Akhtar et al.’s (1996) study were exposed to four toys in one trial. As a result, the contextual difference between the target toy and the other three toys make the target toy more salient than the other three toys. Therefore, the possibility that correct target toy selection was due to the perceptual salience of the target toy could not be excluded. In addition, the authors did not require the children to explore the target toy with the adults before the novel label was produced. Thus, the possibility that the children’s selection of the target toy was due to novelty could not be ruled out as well. Finally, the novel label in their study was introduced immediately after the target toy was exposed. This could have resulted in the possibility that correct target toy selection was due to the close temporal relation between the introduction of the novel label and the target toy, i.e., temporal contiguity. In sum, the current study addressed the methodological limitations in Akhtar et al.’s (1996) and Parish-Morris et al.’s (2007) studies in the investigation of word learning via social contextual cues in verbally able AD children in late childhood. We predicted that AD children in late childhood would be able to use social contextual cues to infer speakers’ referential intention to locate the target toy.
Method Participants Two groups of participants were recruited. The first group comprised 18 verbal AD children aged 10–14.67 years (16 boys and 2 girls), recruited from three special education schools in Shanghai. These children were clinically diagnosed with autism. A multi-disciplinary team then confirmed these diagnoses by using DSM-IV/ICD-10 criteria. All the AD children also scored above the cut off criteria on the Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS: Schopler et al. 1980). The second group consisted of 18 TD children aged 5.75–6.25 years (15 boys and 3 girls), recruited from a kindergarten in Shanghai. The two groups were matched for verbal and non-verbal ability by using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (PPVT: Sang and Miao 1990) and the Combined Raven’s Test (CRT: Li and Chen 1989) respectively. The descriptive statistics of these tests
1479 Table 1 Means and standard deviations (SD) of chronological age (CA) and participants’ raw scores on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (PPVT), Combined Raven’s Test (CRT), and Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS) ADa (n = 18) CA (years)
11.25 (2.92)
TDb (n = 18) 5.92 (0.33)
PPVT (raw score)
73.35 (25.04)
83.44 (17.62)
CRT (raw score)
33.29 (9.21)
27.55 (10.91)
CARS (raw score)
38.11 (5.38)
16.61 (0.92)
a
Autism disorder
b
Typically developing
are shown in Table 1. No significant difference was found between the AD and TD children in terms of PPVT raw scores [t(34) = 1.37, p [ .05], and CRT raw scores [t(34) = 1.67, p [ .05]. However, significant differences were found between the AD and TD children in terms of chronological age [t(34) = 7.68, p \ .001], and CARS raw scores [t(34) = 16.72, p \ .001].
Materials The stimuli included eight pairs of novel toys used in the experimental phase and two pairs of familiar toys used in the familiarization phase. The novel toys are fictitious animals called ‘‘pocket monsters,’’ chosen from 468 characters in an animation game. To ensure that the two novel toys in each pair were not significantly different in terms of novelty and salience, 30 children (mean age 68.8 months; range 56–80 months) were randomly presented with a pair of novel toys in a separate test and asked to name these novel toys as well as which of the pair they found interesting and preferred. The familiar toys consist of a ball, an apple, a dog, and a cat, all of which are highly familiar to preschoolers. Each toy within each novel pair serves as a target and as a distracter and was placed at the left and right positions an equal number of times. Each toy was placed in a separate opaque box with a lid before the beginning of the experiment. Eight novel labels, judged as nonsense words by 30 college students, were used, with each label consisting of two Chinese characters randomly chosen from a Chinese dictionary. Procedure The AD and TD children were tested individually in a quiet and familiar room at their respective schools by two adults (a speaker and an assistant). In the experimental phase, each participant had to go through four knowledge trials and four ignorance trials. The order of the trials presented
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to each child was randomized. In the knowledge trials, the speaker began by presenting two boxes, each containing a novel toy, and said, ‘‘Look what I have brought for you.’’ The speaker then took the novel toys out separately from the two boxes and asked, ‘‘Would you like to play with these together?’’ The child played with each toy for approximately 30 s with the two adults before the speaker said to the child, ‘‘Excuse me, I have to leave for a moment. You may carry on playing with the toys with this lady [referring to the assistant].’’ After the speaker left the room, the assistant played with one of the toys with the child for approximately another 30 s. Then, the assistant said to the child, ‘‘Oh, time’s up. We should place it back in its box.’’ After the child did so, the speaker returned and announced, ‘‘I am back.’’ The child then went on to play with the other toy with both adults for approximately another 30 s. Subsequently, the assistant told the child, ‘‘Oh, time’s up. We should place it back in its box too.’’ After the child did so, the speaker asked the child, ‘‘Oh, where is the [novel label]? Where is the [novel label]? Could you bring me the [novel label]?’’ After the child made the selection and brought the toy to the speaker, the speaker took the pair of toys away, presented the next pair, and repeated the procedure. In the knowledge trials, the speaker articulated the novel label after the pair of toys was placed back in their boxes. The speaker’s eye gaze was uninformative towards the selection of the target toy. In order to correctly attach the target toy to the novel label, participants needed to infer that the speaker was asking for the toy that was kept in the box during the speaker’s absence, namely, the toy hidden first. In other words, the children had to be aware of the speaker’s experience and deduce that the speaker would be referring to the toy whose location was unknown to the speaker. The ignorance trial was identical to the knowledge trial except that the speaker returned after both toys were placed back into the boxes. In the ignorance trials, as the speaker did not see where the pair of novel toys was placed, participants needed to make the selection by chance. Before the experimental phase, the children were required to go through a familiarization phase, which was identical to the experimental phase except that novel toys and labels were replaced with familiar toys and labels. The familiarization trials were repeated until the speaker was sure that the child could understand and follow the instructions, and the target toy was selected.
J Autism Dev Disord (2014) 44:1478–1482
selected against chance in the knowledge and ignorance conditions for each group of children. Furthermore, to examine whether the performance on the selection of target toys in the knowledge and ignorance trial conditions differed between the AD and TD groups, we conducted a 2 (group: AD vs. TD) 9 2 (condition: ignorance vs. knowledge) mixed-subject analysis of variance (ANOVA) with the number of target toys selected as the dependent variable.
Results Figure 1 shows the mean number of times (out of four) that the target toy, was selected in each condition for the AD and TD children. For the AD children, the number of target toys selected was not significantly different from chance in the ignorance condition, t(17) = .72, p = .48, and in the knowledge condition, t(17) = .42, p = .68. However, the TD children selected the target toys at levels significantly above chance in the knowledge condition, t(17) = 6.93, p \ .001, but not in the ignorance condition, t(17) = 1.39, p = .18. This result indicates that the TD children, but not the AD children, used social intention to learn words. The ANOVA revealed significant main effects of condition [F(1, 34) = 14.51, p = .001, g2p = .29] and of group [F(1, 34) = 5.56, p \ .05, g2p = .14]. There was also a significant interaction between group and condition [F(1, 34) = 16.51, p \ .001, g2p = .33]. Further analysis revealed that the TD group showed a significant difference in the number of target toys selected between the knowledge condition and the ignorance condition (p \ .001) while no such difference was found for the AD group (p = .86). This finding indicates that the word learning performance of TD children via social intention is better than that of AD children.
Statistical Methods To determine whether the two groups of children were able to learn words by using social intention, a one-sample t test was used to compare the mean number of target toys
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Fig. 1 Number of target toys selected on the word learning trials. The dotted line represents selection at chance level and error bars represent standard error. ***p \ .001
J Autism Dev Disord (2014) 44:1478–1482
Discussion This study explored whether verbally able AD children are capable of learning new words via social contexts by late childhood. The present study, consistent with Parish-Morris et al.’s (2007) study, found that the TD children demonstrated the ability to use social contextual cues in determining adults’ referential intentions. The present design used two toys in each trial and also required that the participants explored the pair of novel toys with the adults before the novel label was produced. These specific approaches ensured that the TD children’s selection of the target toy was not due to the perceptual salience and the novelty of the target toy. In addition, the third specific approach modified the adults’ period of absence. While the adult left the experimental setting before the presentation of the last toy in Akhtar et al.’s (1996) study, the adult in this study is absent during the presentation of the first toy. This excluded the possibility that successful word learning in the TD children was due to the temporal contiguity between the novel label and the target toy. Consequently, the participants in the current study had only social contextual cues to rely on in order to infer the speaker’s referential intention to select the target toy. Although the present study reduced the cognitive demands of the tasks by decreasing the number of toys in one trial from six to two and did not require the children to understand the speaker’s expression, body language, or linguistic cues, the AD children were still unable to learn words via social contextual cues. This result indicates that it is neither the cognitive demands of the task nor the deficits in social pragmatic and linguistic skills in autism that led to the negative findings in Parish-Morris et al.’s (2007) study. Despite the difference in procedure between the two studies, both required an inference of the speaker’s referential intention based on social contextual cues. As this is an important aspect of theory of mind (ToM), it is likely that deficits in the ToM of AD children resulted in the failure to perform in the two tasks of both studies. However, the present task is more difficult than that of Parish-Morris et al. (2007) because while the latter required only one social inference of the speaker’s intention based on social pragmatic cues, the former required an inference of the speaker’s knowledge state based on the speaker’s experience and then an inference about the speaker’s intention based on the speaker’s knowledge state. In fact, this task is very similar to false belief tasks that also involve two social inferences. Furthermore, it is evident in the literature that AD children continue to fail in false belief tasks through middle childhood and adolescence (Happe´ 1995; Peterson et al. 2005). As a result, selecting AD children in late childhood in the current study was still insufficient in compensating for the young age of the AD preschoolers in Parish-Morris et al.’s (2007) study.
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A number of recent studies showed that TD children can learn words in a wide variety of social pragmatic contexts as early as 18 months, whereas AD children are still unable to do so by late childhood. In children with autism, impaired joint attention—that is, the poor ability in focusing on a shared toy with another individual—could explain why the learning of one’s first vocabulary is delayed. On the other hand, a deficit in the understanding of another person’s intention might result in these children’s slow pace in vocabulary development. This could explain why AD children are significantly delayed in lexical knowledge from the second year compared with TD children (Landa and Garrett-Mayer 2006). Their findings supported Parish-Morris et al.’s (2007) argument that the lack of ability in inferring another person’s referential intentions based on social contextual cues might prevent AD children from accelerating the pace of their vocabulary development and acquiring a larger vocabulary. In conclusion, the current result, in conjunction with AD children’s failure to select the target toy as a referent of a novel word in the situation of Parish-Morris et al.’s (2007) study, suggests that AD children are unable to infer adults’ referential intention to locate the correct toy as a referent of a novel word via social contextual cues. Acknowledgments This research was a part of a project from the National Social Science Foundation of China: ‘‘The study of language cognition and intervention performance in autism’’ (Project Number: 06BYY18). We are extremely grateful to Qing Tian, Wenbin Guo for their help in collecting some of the data reported in this paper. We offer special thanks to the children and families who participated in this study. This manuscript was completed in partial fulfillment of the first author’s Ph.D. degree at the East China Normal University.
References Akechi, H., Senju, A., Kikuchi, Y., Tojo, Y., Osanai, H., & Hasegawa, T. (2011). Do children with ASD use referential gaze to learn the name of an object? An eye-tracking study. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 5, 1230–1242. Akhtar, N., Carpenter, M., & Tomasello, M. (1996). The role of discourse novelty in early word learning. Child Development, 67, 635–645. Baldwin, D. A. (1993). Infants’ ability to consult the speaker for clues to word meaning. Journal of Child Language, 20, 395–418. Baron-Cohen, S., Baldwin, D. A., & Crowson, M. (1997). Do children with autism use the speaker direction of gaze strategy to crack the code of language? Child Development, 68, 48–57. Briganti, A. M., & Cohen, L. B. (2011). Examining the role of social cues in early word learning. Infant Behavior and Development, 34(1), 211–214. Diesendruck, G., Markson, L., Akhtar, N., & Reudor, A. (2004). Twoyear-olds’ sensitivity to speakers’ intent: an alternative account of Samuelson and Smith. Developmental Science, 7(1), 33–41. Gliga, T., Elsabbagh, M., Hudry, K., Charman, T., & Johnson, M. H. (2012). Gaze following, gaze reading, and word learning in children at risk for autism. Child Development, 83(3), 926–938.
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1482 Happe´, F. G. E. (1995). The role of age and verbal ability in the theory of mind task performance of subjects with autism. Child Development, 66, 843–855. Hollich, G. J., Hirsh-Pasek, K., & Golinkoff, R. M. (2000). Breaking the language barrier: An emergentist coalition model for the origins of word learning. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 65(3), 1–123. Houston-Price, C., Plunkett, K., & Duffy, H. (2006). The use of social and salience cues in early word learning. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 95, 27–55. Landa, R., & Garrett-Mayer, E. (2006). Development in infants with autism spectrum disorders: A prospective study. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 47(6), 629–638. Li, D., & Chen, G. (1989). Combined Ravens’ test (CRT): Chinese revised version. Shanghai: East China Normal University. (in Chinese). Parish-Morris, J., Hennon, E. A., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Golinkoff, R. M., & Tager-Flusberg, H. (2007). Children with autism illuminate the role of social intention in word learning. Child Development, 78(4), 1265–1287. Peterson, C. C., Wellman, H. M., & Liu, D. (2005). Steps in theoryof-mind development for children with deafness or autism. Child Development, 76(2), 502–517. Preisslera, M. A., & Carey, S. (2005). The role of inferences about referential intent in word learning: Evidence from autism. Cognition, 97, 13–23.
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J Autism Dev Disord (2014) 44:1478–1482 Samuelson, L. K., & Smith, L. B. (1998). Memory and attention make smart word learning: An alternative account of Akhtar Carpenter and Tomasello. Child Development, 69(1), 94–104. Sang, B., & Miao, X. (1990). The revision of trail norm of Peabody picture vocabulary test revised (PPVT-R) In Shanghai proper. Psychological Science, 14(5), 20–25. (in Chinese). Schopler, E., Reichler, R. J., DeVellis, R. F., & Daly, K. (1980). Toward objective classification of childhood autism: Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS). Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 10(1), 91–103. Steele, S., Joseph, R. M., & Tager-Flusberg, H. (2003). Brief report: Developmental change in theory of mind abilities in children with autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 33(4), 461–467. Tager-Flusberg, H. (2004). Strategies for conducting research on language in autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 34, 75–80. Tager-Flusberg, H., Paul, R., & Lord, C. (2005). Language and communication in autism. In F. Volkmar, R. Paul, & A. Klin (Eds.), Handbook of autism and pervasive developmental disorders (3rd ed., pp. 335–364). New York: Wiley. Tomasello, M., Strosberg, R., & Akhtar, N. (1996). Eighteen-monthold children learn words in non-ostensive contexts. Journal of Child Language, 23, 157–176.
BRIEF REPORT
Brief Report: Do Children with Autism Gather Information from Social Contexts to Aid Their Word Learning? Wei Jing • Junming Fang
Published online: 15 November 2013 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Abstract Typically developing (TD) infants could capitalize on social eye gaze and social contexts to aid word learning. Although children with autism disorder (AD) are known to exhibit atypicality in word learning via social eye gaze, their ability to utilize social contexts for word learning is not well understood. We investigated whether verbal AD children exhibit word learning ability via social contextual cues by late childhood. We found that AD children, unlike TD controls, failed to infer the speaker’s referential intention through information gathered from the social context. This suggests that TD children can learn words in diverse social pragmatic contexts in as early as toddlerhood whereas AD children are still unable to do so by late childhood. Keywords Autism disorder Social contexts Word learning Late childhood
Introduction The emergentist coalition model suggests that social cues utilized for word learning include social eye gaze and social contexts (Hollich et al. 2000). As a substantial body of evidence has demonstrated, typically developing (TD) infants by 18 months can utilize adults’ eye gaze to guide W. Jing (&) College of Education, Shaanxi Normal University, 199 South Chang’an Road, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China e-mail: [email protected] J. Fang Department of Preschool and Special Education, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China e-mail: [email protected]
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word learning (Baldwin 1993; Briganti and Cohen 2011; Hollich et al. 2000; Houston-Price et al. 2006). They can also capitalize on social contexts to infer adults’ referential intention when social eye gaze is absent or uninformative (Akhtar et al. 1996; Diesendruck et al. 2004; Tomasello et al. 1996). The inability of children with autism to engage in word learning via eye gaze has been widely demonstrated in the literature (Akechi et al. 2011; Baron-Cohen et al. 1997; Gliga et al. 2012; Parish-Morris et al. 2007; Preisslera and Carey 2005). To date, however, only Parish-Morris et al. (2007) have investigated AD children’s word learning via reading intention within certain social contexts. The study by Parish-Morris et al. (2007) seems to offer clear evidence that AD children are unable to learn words via social contextual cues. However, three methodological limitations within the study necessitate reconsideration of their findings. First, there is evidence that AD children have significant developmental improvement in theory of mind ability, which is primarily related to the children’s language abilities (Steele et al. 2003). Therefore, the AD preschoolers in Parish-Morris et al.’s (2007) study were likely too young a sample for the study to obtain any positive findings. Second, their study presented six toys in one trial, which imposed high cognitive demands on the participants. This could have been confounded with the children’s deficits in general cognitive processes, such as memory, thereby influencing the performance of word learning via social contexts. Finally, as the adults’ referential intention was inferred via their expressions, body language, and linguistic cues in that study, AD children’s impairments in social pragmatic and language skills (Tager-Flusberg 2004; Tager-Flusberg et al. 2005) might have prevented AD children from succeeding in their task. Therefore, similar to Akhtar et al.’s study (1996), referential intention was inferred from the momentary absence of the adult in the present experiment.
J Autism Dev Disord (2014) 44:1478–1482
In Akhtar et al.’s (1996) study, young children were required to make use of discourse pragmatics and the speaker’s experience and point of view to determine the intended referent of a novel word. However, Samuelson and Smith’s (1998) study provided three reasons to question whether the successful word learning in Akhtar et al.’s study (1996) was due to understanding adults’ referential intention based on social contextual cues or to simple associative learning relied on basic attention and memory processes. First, children in Akhtar et al.’s (1996) study were exposed to four toys in one trial. As a result, the contextual difference between the target toy and the other three toys make the target toy more salient than the other three toys. Therefore, the possibility that correct target toy selection was due to the perceptual salience of the target toy could not be excluded. In addition, the authors did not require the children to explore the target toy with the adults before the novel label was produced. Thus, the possibility that the children’s selection of the target toy was due to novelty could not be ruled out as well. Finally, the novel label in their study was introduced immediately after the target toy was exposed. This could have resulted in the possibility that correct target toy selection was due to the close temporal relation between the introduction of the novel label and the target toy, i.e., temporal contiguity. In sum, the current study addressed the methodological limitations in Akhtar et al.’s (1996) and Parish-Morris et al.’s (2007) studies in the investigation of word learning via social contextual cues in verbally able AD children in late childhood. We predicted that AD children in late childhood would be able to use social contextual cues to infer speakers’ referential intention to locate the target toy.
Method Participants Two groups of participants were recruited. The first group comprised 18 verbal AD children aged 10–14.67 years (16 boys and 2 girls), recruited from three special education schools in Shanghai. These children were clinically diagnosed with autism. A multi-disciplinary team then confirmed these diagnoses by using DSM-IV/ICD-10 criteria. All the AD children also scored above the cut off criteria on the Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS: Schopler et al. 1980). The second group consisted of 18 TD children aged 5.75–6.25 years (15 boys and 3 girls), recruited from a kindergarten in Shanghai. The two groups were matched for verbal and non-verbal ability by using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (PPVT: Sang and Miao 1990) and the Combined Raven’s Test (CRT: Li and Chen 1989) respectively. The descriptive statistics of these tests
1479 Table 1 Means and standard deviations (SD) of chronological age (CA) and participants’ raw scores on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (PPVT), Combined Raven’s Test (CRT), and Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS) ADa (n = 18) CA (years)
11.25 (2.92)
TDb (n = 18) 5.92 (0.33)
PPVT (raw score)
73.35 (25.04)
83.44 (17.62)
CRT (raw score)
33.29 (9.21)
27.55 (10.91)
CARS (raw score)
38.11 (5.38)
16.61 (0.92)
a
Autism disorder
b
Typically developing
are shown in Table 1. No significant difference was found between the AD and TD children in terms of PPVT raw scores [t(34) = 1.37, p [ .05], and CRT raw scores [t(34) = 1.67, p [ .05]. However, significant differences were found between the AD and TD children in terms of chronological age [t(34) = 7.68, p \ .001], and CARS raw scores [t(34) = 16.72, p \ .001].
Materials The stimuli included eight pairs of novel toys used in the experimental phase and two pairs of familiar toys used in the familiarization phase. The novel toys are fictitious animals called ‘‘pocket monsters,’’ chosen from 468 characters in an animation game. To ensure that the two novel toys in each pair were not significantly different in terms of novelty and salience, 30 children (mean age 68.8 months; range 56–80 months) were randomly presented with a pair of novel toys in a separate test and asked to name these novel toys as well as which of the pair they found interesting and preferred. The familiar toys consist of a ball, an apple, a dog, and a cat, all of which are highly familiar to preschoolers. Each toy within each novel pair serves as a target and as a distracter and was placed at the left and right positions an equal number of times. Each toy was placed in a separate opaque box with a lid before the beginning of the experiment. Eight novel labels, judged as nonsense words by 30 college students, were used, with each label consisting of two Chinese characters randomly chosen from a Chinese dictionary. Procedure The AD and TD children were tested individually in a quiet and familiar room at their respective schools by two adults (a speaker and an assistant). In the experimental phase, each participant had to go through four knowledge trials and four ignorance trials. The order of the trials presented
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to each child was randomized. In the knowledge trials, the speaker began by presenting two boxes, each containing a novel toy, and said, ‘‘Look what I have brought for you.’’ The speaker then took the novel toys out separately from the two boxes and asked, ‘‘Would you like to play with these together?’’ The child played with each toy for approximately 30 s with the two adults before the speaker said to the child, ‘‘Excuse me, I have to leave for a moment. You may carry on playing with the toys with this lady [referring to the assistant].’’ After the speaker left the room, the assistant played with one of the toys with the child for approximately another 30 s. Then, the assistant said to the child, ‘‘Oh, time’s up. We should place it back in its box.’’ After the child did so, the speaker returned and announced, ‘‘I am back.’’ The child then went on to play with the other toy with both adults for approximately another 30 s. Subsequently, the assistant told the child, ‘‘Oh, time’s up. We should place it back in its box too.’’ After the child did so, the speaker asked the child, ‘‘Oh, where is the [novel label]? Where is the [novel label]? Could you bring me the [novel label]?’’ After the child made the selection and brought the toy to the speaker, the speaker took the pair of toys away, presented the next pair, and repeated the procedure. In the knowledge trials, the speaker articulated the novel label after the pair of toys was placed back in their boxes. The speaker’s eye gaze was uninformative towards the selection of the target toy. In order to correctly attach the target toy to the novel label, participants needed to infer that the speaker was asking for the toy that was kept in the box during the speaker’s absence, namely, the toy hidden first. In other words, the children had to be aware of the speaker’s experience and deduce that the speaker would be referring to the toy whose location was unknown to the speaker. The ignorance trial was identical to the knowledge trial except that the speaker returned after both toys were placed back into the boxes. In the ignorance trials, as the speaker did not see where the pair of novel toys was placed, participants needed to make the selection by chance. Before the experimental phase, the children were required to go through a familiarization phase, which was identical to the experimental phase except that novel toys and labels were replaced with familiar toys and labels. The familiarization trials were repeated until the speaker was sure that the child could understand and follow the instructions, and the target toy was selected.
J Autism Dev Disord (2014) 44:1478–1482
selected against chance in the knowledge and ignorance conditions for each group of children. Furthermore, to examine whether the performance on the selection of target toys in the knowledge and ignorance trial conditions differed between the AD and TD groups, we conducted a 2 (group: AD vs. TD) 9 2 (condition: ignorance vs. knowledge) mixed-subject analysis of variance (ANOVA) with the number of target toys selected as the dependent variable.
Results Figure 1 shows the mean number of times (out of four) that the target toy, was selected in each condition for the AD and TD children. For the AD children, the number of target toys selected was not significantly different from chance in the ignorance condition, t(17) = .72, p = .48, and in the knowledge condition, t(17) = .42, p = .68. However, the TD children selected the target toys at levels significantly above chance in the knowledge condition, t(17) = 6.93, p \ .001, but not in the ignorance condition, t(17) = 1.39, p = .18. This result indicates that the TD children, but not the AD children, used social intention to learn words. The ANOVA revealed significant main effects of condition [F(1, 34) = 14.51, p = .001, g2p = .29] and of group [F(1, 34) = 5.56, p \ .05, g2p = .14]. There was also a significant interaction between group and condition [F(1, 34) = 16.51, p \ .001, g2p = .33]. Further analysis revealed that the TD group showed a significant difference in the number of target toys selected between the knowledge condition and the ignorance condition (p \ .001) while no such difference was found for the AD group (p = .86). This finding indicates that the word learning performance of TD children via social intention is better than that of AD children.
Statistical Methods To determine whether the two groups of children were able to learn words by using social intention, a one-sample t test was used to compare the mean number of target toys
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Fig. 1 Number of target toys selected on the word learning trials. The dotted line represents selection at chance level and error bars represent standard error. ***p \ .001
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Discussion This study explored whether verbally able AD children are capable of learning new words via social contexts by late childhood. The present study, consistent with Parish-Morris et al.’s (2007) study, found that the TD children demonstrated the ability to use social contextual cues in determining adults’ referential intentions. The present design used two toys in each trial and also required that the participants explored the pair of novel toys with the adults before the novel label was produced. These specific approaches ensured that the TD children’s selection of the target toy was not due to the perceptual salience and the novelty of the target toy. In addition, the third specific approach modified the adults’ period of absence. While the adult left the experimental setting before the presentation of the last toy in Akhtar et al.’s (1996) study, the adult in this study is absent during the presentation of the first toy. This excluded the possibility that successful word learning in the TD children was due to the temporal contiguity between the novel label and the target toy. Consequently, the participants in the current study had only social contextual cues to rely on in order to infer the speaker’s referential intention to select the target toy. Although the present study reduced the cognitive demands of the tasks by decreasing the number of toys in one trial from six to two and did not require the children to understand the speaker’s expression, body language, or linguistic cues, the AD children were still unable to learn words via social contextual cues. This result indicates that it is neither the cognitive demands of the task nor the deficits in social pragmatic and linguistic skills in autism that led to the negative findings in Parish-Morris et al.’s (2007) study. Despite the difference in procedure between the two studies, both required an inference of the speaker’s referential intention based on social contextual cues. As this is an important aspect of theory of mind (ToM), it is likely that deficits in the ToM of AD children resulted in the failure to perform in the two tasks of both studies. However, the present task is more difficult than that of Parish-Morris et al. (2007) because while the latter required only one social inference of the speaker’s intention based on social pragmatic cues, the former required an inference of the speaker’s knowledge state based on the speaker’s experience and then an inference about the speaker’s intention based on the speaker’s knowledge state. In fact, this task is very similar to false belief tasks that also involve two social inferences. Furthermore, it is evident in the literature that AD children continue to fail in false belief tasks through middle childhood and adolescence (Happe´ 1995; Peterson et al. 2005). As a result, selecting AD children in late childhood in the current study was still insufficient in compensating for the young age of the AD preschoolers in Parish-Morris et al.’s (2007) study.
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A number of recent studies showed that TD children can learn words in a wide variety of social pragmatic contexts as early as 18 months, whereas AD children are still unable to do so by late childhood. In children with autism, impaired joint attention—that is, the poor ability in focusing on a shared toy with another individual—could explain why the learning of one’s first vocabulary is delayed. On the other hand, a deficit in the understanding of another person’s intention might result in these children’s slow pace in vocabulary development. This could explain why AD children are significantly delayed in lexical knowledge from the second year compared with TD children (Landa and Garrett-Mayer 2006). Their findings supported Parish-Morris et al.’s (2007) argument that the lack of ability in inferring another person’s referential intentions based on social contextual cues might prevent AD children from accelerating the pace of their vocabulary development and acquiring a larger vocabulary. In conclusion, the current result, in conjunction with AD children’s failure to select the target toy as a referent of a novel word in the situation of Parish-Morris et al.’s (2007) study, suggests that AD children are unable to infer adults’ referential intention to locate the correct toy as a referent of a novel word via social contextual cues. Acknowledgments This research was a part of a project from the National Social Science Foundation of China: ‘‘The study of language cognition and intervention performance in autism’’ (Project Number: 06BYY18). We are extremely grateful to Qing Tian, Wenbin Guo for their help in collecting some of the data reported in this paper. We offer special thanks to the children and families who participated in this study. This manuscript was completed in partial fulfillment of the first author’s Ph.D. degree at the East China Normal University.
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