Maternal Pragmatic Language Difficulties in the FMR1 Premutation and the Broad Autism Phenotype: Associations with Individual and Family Outcomes.
Jessica Klusek, Angela John Thurman, Leonard Abbeduto
PMID 33813684WHAT IT FOUND
Mothers with mild social communication difficulties reported higher loneliness regardless of whether their child had Fragile X or autism.
In the Fragile X group only, these difficulties also linked to depression, lower life satisfaction, and poorer family relationships.
Key findings
01Pragmatic language difficulties were associated with increased loneliness in both groups of mothers, with a large effect size that persisted after accounting for other personality traits.
02In mothers of children with Fragile X syndrome, pragmatic difficulties were linked to lower life satisfaction, greater depression symptoms, and reduced family relationship quality, whereas no such associations were found in mothers of children with autism.
03The two groups of mothers did not differ in the average severity of their pragmatic language difficulties, loneliness, depression, or life satisfaction scores.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study is correlational, so it cannot prove that communication difficulties cause loneliness or depression; the relationship may be bidirectional. Loneliness and depression data were missing for participants recruited at the University of California, Davis site due to time constraints, reducing the sample size for those analyses. The sample had limited racial diversity, particularly in the group of mothers of children with Fragile X syndrome. The study did not measure lifetime history of depression, only current symptoms, which may have influenced the results.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest. The study was supported by grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that pragmatic language difficulties have the same consequences for all parents of children with developmental disabilities. The study found that while loneliness was linked to communication difficulties in both groups, depression and poor family functioning were only associated with these difficulties in mothers of children with Fragile X syndrome, not in mothers of children with autism.