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Shared attention and grammatical development in typical children and children with autism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 1998

PAMELA ROSENTHAL ROLLINS  and
CATHERINE E. SNOW
PAMELA ROSENTHAL ROLLINS
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Dallas, Callier Center for Communication Disorders
CATHERINE E. SNOW
Affiliation:
Harvard Graduate School of Education
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Abstract

The two studies presented here explore the relationship between children's pragmatic skills and their growth in grammar. In study 1, thirty normally developing children were videotaped interacting with their parents at 1;2 and again at 2;7. Using correlational and regression techniques, we found that pragmatic accomplishments of MUTUAL ATTENTION, as well as mother's conversational style, explained 45% of the variance in grammar at 2;7. The second study investigated pragmatic–grammatical relationships with data from 6 high-functioning children with autism. To control for individual variation in skill level at the start of the study, within-individual growth rates for grammar were estimated as our outcome. The results substantiated those of study 1, in that pragmatic accomplishments within mutual attention predicted the per month growth rate in grammar. We interpret these findings as consistent with the position that the infant's social-pragmatic skills contribute to the acquisition of grammar.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , October 1998 , pp. 653 - 673
Copyright
© 1998 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The authors would like to express their appreciation to Barbara Pan for co-ordinating the transcription and data analysis on the New England sample and for help with reliability. To Helen Tager-Flusberg, who collected the rare sample of children with autism. She generously shared her videotapes, transcripts and transcriptions of the videotapes and IPSyn scores for the children in Study 2. To Steve Resnick, for supplying vocabulary comprehension and production measures on the typical children. This research was supported in part by NIH HD 23388, the March of Dimes and Texas Instruments. Study 2 is based on a doctoral thesis presented to the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Portions of the analyses discussed here have been presented at the 1995 American Speech Hearing Association Convention and the 1997 Society for Research in Child Development.