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Bidirectional influences of caregiver utterances and supported joint engagement in children with and without autism spectrum disorder.

ABSTRACT: This study examined sequential associations between pairs of caregiver talk and caregiver-child joint engagement categories. Sequential associations quantify the extent to which one event (such as a particular type of caregiver talk) follows another event (such as a particular type of joint engagement) in a pre-specified time window, while controlling for the chance occurrence of the sequence. Although unable to support strong conclusions about causality, the requirement of sequential analysis that key events occur within a close temporal sequence rules out alternative explanation for associations that summary-level correlations cannot. We applied sequential analysis to observational data on 98 caregiver-child dyads, fifty of which included a child with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Groups were matched on mental age, and all were just beginning to develop spoken vocabulary. Sequential associations between supported joint engagement and caregiver follow-in utterances were stronger in ASD dyads as compared to dyads with typically developing children. Further, sequential associations between utterances related to the child's focus of attention followed by higher order supported joint engagement (HSJE) were stronger than between utterances that related to the caregiver's focus of attention and HSJE, across both groups. Finally, sequential associations between follow-in directives followed by HSJE were stronger than between follow-in comments followed by HSJE, again across both groups of children. Autism Res 2018, 11: 755-765. © 2018 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY:Our findings suggest that caregivers of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may be particularly adept at timing their talk to follow moments of high-level joint engagement, and that follow-in directives are particularly facilitative of high-level joint engagement. Future intervention work can capitalize on these findings to support high level caregiver-child engagement around toys, which may promote development in children with ASD.

SUBMITTER: Bottema-Beutel K

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5991996 | biostudies-literature | 2018 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Bidirectional influences of caregiver utterances and supported joint engagement in children with and without autism spectrum disorder.

Bottema-Beutel Kristen K Lloyd Blair B Watson Linda L Yoder Paul P

Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research 20180122 5

This study examined sequential associations between pairs of caregiver talk and caregiver-child joint engagement categories. Sequential associations quantify the extent to which one event (such as a particular type of caregiver talk) follows another event (such as a particular type of joint engagement) in a pre-specified time window, while controlling for the chance occurrence of the sequence. Although unable to support strong conclusions about causality, the requirement of sequential analysis t ...[more]

PMID: 29356414

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Project description:Coaching caregivers to deliver Naturalistic Developmental Behavioral Intervention (NDBI) strategies to their young child with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) could help address the provider capacity barrier in sub-Saharan Africa. However, the behavioral and developmental research that underpins NDBIs is overwhelmingly drawn from high resource settings. Therefore, our understanding of joint activity routines, including play and family routines in which NDBI strategies are embedded, may have limited applicability in low resource, culturally diverse environments. Important questions remain on how to adapt NDBIs to be relevant in the family lives in these settings. This study aimed to elicit descriptions of joint activity routines from caregivers of young children with ASD in South Africa, to understand whether an NDBI-informed caregiver coaching could 'fit' within the multicultural, multilingual South African context. Four focus groups were conducted with 22 caregivers of young children with ASD who were recruited from the Western Cape Education Department autism waiting list. Data were analyzed through directed content analysis, which uses inductive methods to determine salient themes and subthemes. The predetermined initial coding classifications were based on joint activity routine categories of object-based play, sensory social routines, and family routines. Participants' descriptions of caregiver-child interactions aligned with a-priori joint activity routine categories. During object-based play, caregivers engaged in turn-taking, taught developmental skills (for example cognitive, language, and fine motor skills), and participated in child-directed activities. During sensory social routines, caregivers described active, physical play, awareness of child affect, increased child expressive language, and willingness to engage with different play partners. During family routines, caregivers detailed child participation in mealtime and bath time. These data suggest that South African caregivers of young children with ASD use joint activity routines to engage their children and teach them new skills, thus suggesting a degree of 'fit' between South African caregiver-child interactions and an NDBI-informed caregiver coaching approach. However, more information on family routines and which caregiver interacts with the young child with ASD during these routines would help tailor these interventions for low-resource African settings.

Project description:This study explores the emergence and productivity of word order usage in Mandarin-speaking typically-developing (TD) children and children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and examines how this emergence relates to frequency of use in caregiver input. Forty-two caregiver-child dyads participated in video-recorded 30-min semi-structured play sessions. Eleven children with ASD were matched with 10 20-month-old TD children and another 11 children with ASD were matched with 10 26-month-old TD children, on expressive language. We report four major findings: (1) Preschool Mandarin-speaking children with ASD produced word order structures with pervasive ellipsis at similar rates to language-matched TD children, but also displayed differences from TD children in their usage of SVt and VtO frames; (2) Grammatical productivity was observed in both TD children and children with ASD; moreover, children with ASD with higher expressive language produced less stereotyped language; (3) Both TD children and children with ASD heard a range of word orders in their caregivers' input, with TD children's input greater in amount and complexity; however, caregivers of both groups also showed no age/language-related changes in word order usage; (4) Few word-order-specific correlations emerged between caregivers and their children; however, strong correlations were observed for mean length of utterances (MLU) for both groups: Caregivers who produced longer/more complex utterances had children who did the same. Taken together, it seems that despite their pragmatic deficits, the early grammatical knowledge of word order in Mandarin-exposed children with ASD is well preserved and in general follows the typical developmental pattern. Moreover, caregiver input is broadly rather than finely tuned to the linguistic development of TD children and children with ASD, and plays a more important role in children's general syntactic development than in specific word order acquisition. Thus, early word order usage in preschool Mandarin-speaking TD children and children with ASD may be influenced by both caregiver input and child abilities.

Project description:Social motivation is a foundational construct with regard to the etiology, neurobiology, and phenotype of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Multiple theories suggest that early emerging alterations to social motivation underlie a developmental cascade of social and communication deficits across the lifespan. Despite this significance, methods to measure social motivation vary widely, with little data to date as to how different measures might compare. In this study, we explore three existing caregiver-report measures that have been proposed to quantify social motivation among school-age children with ASD (n = 18; all male) and without ASD (n = 36; 50% female), with the broad goal of characterizing social motivation across measures and specific aims of investigating (a) diagnostic and sex differences in social motivation, (b) correspondence between measures, and (c) relationships between social motivation and broader social outcomes. Across all three measures, individuals with ASD had lower social motivation by caregiver-report. However, they did display individual differences in the degree of social motivation reported. There were no differences in social motivation between males and females without ASD on any of the three measures. For the full sample, measures of social motivation correlated with one another as anticipated, and stronger social motivation was associated with stronger social skills and fewer social difficulties. Our data suggest that social motivation among children with ASD may be best conceptualized as an individual difference that is diminished on average relative to peers but which varies among children and adolescents with ASD, rather than as an absolute absence or uniform deficit. LAY SUMMARY: Several theories suggest that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience less social motivation than their peers without ASD, contributing to difficulties in social skills. Based on multiple caregiver-report questionnaires, social motivation was reduced on average for school-age children with ASD but also varied among children with ASD. Stronger social motivation was related to stronger social skills and fewer social problems. Future work should include more girls with ASD, consider social motivation across age groups, and include first-hand perspectives from people with ASD.

Project description:Recent research on autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) suggests that individuals with autism may have a basic deficit in synchronizing with others, and that this difficulty may lead to more complex social and communicative deficits. Here, we examined synchronization during an open-ended joint improvisation (JI) paradigm, called the mirror game (MG). In the MG, two players take turns leading, following, and jointly improvising motion using two handles set on parallel tracks, while their motion tracks are recorded with high temporal and spatial resolution. A series of previous studies have shown that players in the MG attain moments of highly synchronized co-confident (CC) motion, in which there is no typical kinematic pattern of leader and reactive follower. It has been suggested that during these moments players act as a coupled unit and feel high levels of connectedness. Here, we aimed to assess whether participants with ASD are capable of attaining CC, and whether their MG performance relates to broader motor and social skills. We found that participants with ASD (n = 34) can indeed attain CC moments when playing with an expert improviser, though their performance was attenuated in several ways, compared to typically developing (TD) participants (n = 35). Specifically, ASD participants had lower rates of CC, compared with TD participants, which was most pronounced during the following rounds. In addition, the duration of their CC segments was shorter, across all rounds. When controlling for participants' motor skills (both on the MG console, and more broadly) some of the variability in MG performance was explained, but group differences remained. ASD participants' alexithymia further correlated with their difficulty following another's lead; though other social skills did not relate to MG performance. Participants' subjective reports of the game suggest that other cognitive and emotional factors, such as attention, motivation, and reward-processing, which were not directly measured in the experiment, may impact their performance. Together, these results show that ASD participants can attain moments of high motor synchronization with an expert improviser, even during an open-ended task. Future studies should examine the ways in which these skills may be further harnessed in clinical settings.

Dataset Information

Bidirectional influences of caregiver utterances and supported joint engagement in children with and without autism spectrum disorder.

Publications

Bidirectional influences of caregiver utterances and supported joint engagement in children with and without autism spectrum disorder.

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