Caregiver object labels within supported and coordinated joint engagement during interaction with toddlers at elevated and typical likelihood of autism.
Elizabeth H Kushner, Emily Roemer Britsch, Jana M Iverson
PMID 36424697WHAT IT FOUND
Parents of toddlers at elevated likelihood for autism used more repetitive labels and fewer prompts than typical parents.
Sentence-final labels helped language in supported play but hurt it in coordinated play. Prompts correlated with current speech but not future growth.
Key findings
01Parents of children with elevated likelihood for autism (EL-ASD) produced the highest rate of repeated object labels (tokens) but low unique labels (types) during coordinated joint engagement, though differences were not statistically significant.
02The position of the label in the sentence mattered differently depending on the type of play: labels at the end of a sentence during 'supported' joint engagement predicted better language later, but the same pattern during 'coordinated' joint engagement predicted poorer language.
03Parents of typical likelihood children prompted their toddlers to name objects significantly more often than parents of EL-ASD children. This prompting was linked to the child's current expressive language skills but did not predict language development in the following year.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample was small and predominantly white and college-educated, limiting generalizability. Many children (16 of 55) did not spend any time in coordinated joint engagement, reducing the sample size for analyses in that specific context. The observations were brief (3-6 minutes) and limited to a specific set of toys, so they may not reflect parents' typical speech in other activities. The study is observational and cannot prove that specific parent behaviors caused the child's language outcomes.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest. The study was supported by the National Institute of Health (Extramural).
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the lack of significant differences in most labeling features as evidence that parent input style does not matter. The small sample size and variability in engagement time reduced the power to detect subtle differences, and the significant findings regarding sentence position and prompting show that specific aspects of input are related to child outcomes.