Visual and verbal semantic productions in children with ASD, DLD, and typical language.
Allison Gladfelter, Kacy L Barron, Erik Johnson
PMID 31351344WHAT IT FOUND
When children with autism or developmental language disorder defined new words, they used more meaning details first shown visually than children with typical language did.
Details shown in pictures and words together increased by session 2 and held steady. Data came from 36 children.
Key findings
01Across the groups, children produced larger proportions of semantic features from visual input and from combined visual and verbal input than from verbal input alone.
02The ASD and DLD groups produced greater proportions of visually presented semantic features than the typical language group, but the overall main effect of diagnostic group was not significant.
03The proportion of semantic features from combined visual and verbal input increased from session 1 to session 2 and remained higher in session 3, while proportions from visual or verbal input alone did not significantly change.
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, with 12 children in each group, and the group-by-modality difference only approached significance. The typical language group was younger than the ASD and DLD groups because matching was done on expressive vocabulary, not chronological age. This was a follow-up coding analysis of earlier word-learning data, not a randomized test of an intervention. The statistical model may not capture individual variability as well as mixed-effects models. Children produced very few verbal-only semantic features, and the task did not prompt for features by modality, so verbal differences may be hard to see.
Declared interests
No author conflict-of-interest statement is included in the supplied text. The supplied publication types list NIH extramural and non-U.S. government research support.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the visual advantage as proof that a therapy works. The study analyzed definitions from 36 children after a research word-learning task, the overall difference between diagnostic groups was not significant, and the group-by-modality result only approached significance.