Spoken word recognition in children with autism spectrum disorder: The role of visual disengagement.
Courtney E Venker
PMID 27335107WHAT IT FOUND
Children with autism who more often failed to look away from a central video were slower and less accurate at recognizing spoken words.
This link remained after vocabulary and age in 18 children, but no treatment was tested.
Key findings
01The percentage of trials in which children failed to look away from the center was linked to both spoken word recognition accuracy and recognition latency.
02Visual disengagement was linked to spoken word recognition accuracy beyond vocabulary size. For recognition latency, visual disengagement remained linked after vocabulary size was considered, while vocabulary size was not.
03The link between visual disengagement and spoken word recognition remained after age was considered. Age did not uniquely predict accuracy or latency.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The final analysed sample was only 18 children, down from 28 recruited, because seven did not contribute enough trials and two had intellectual disability. The sample was 94% male, 94% non-Hispanic, and 83% White, so the findings may not generalize to other groups. The study measured visual attention and spoken word recognition in the same session, so it cannot show that poor visual disengagement caused slower or less accurate spoken word recognition. Analyses used one-tailed p values because the authors predicted the direction. The small sample made it impossible to enter visual disengagement, vocabulary, and age into the same model. Children had to contribute at least five valid trials, so children who could not complete the tasks were not analysed.
Declared interests
The supplied text does not include a conflicts-of-interest declaration. The publication types list research support from NIH extramural and non-U.S. government sources.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that helping a child disengage visually will improve spoken word recognition. The study was correlational and did not test an intervention.