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Running head : PREVALENCE OF FROZEN FORMS IN ASD 1 Prevalence of Frozen Forms in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Wivell, Daniel B. |
| Copyright Year | 2017 |
| Abstract | Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has been implicated with a wide variety of language impairments and developmental delays in the acquisition of language in young children. A number of unique impairments in the speech of children with ASD have been proposed. The current study empirically investigates one such proposed language error; namely, that children with ASD produce large numbers of frozen, or unanalyzed language forms. Frozen language forms refer to multi-word phrases that are produced by rote and across both appropriate and inappropriate contexts. The children’s speech was recorded in a supervised play session with a caregiver, and was coded using an adaptation of Pine et. al. (1993)’s coding scheme. The children with ASD produced frozen forms significantly more frequently than the TD children; additionally, the ASD group produced repetitive, “non-frozen” language forms significantly more frequently than the TD group. However, the actual prevalence of these language errors within the ASD group was fairly low (< 12% of all utterances), and the frequency of these errors tended to decrease over time. Thus the existence of forms may not be appropriate indicators of Autism Spectrum Disorder. Additionally, the speech of children with ASD appeared to match the developmental trends of TD children over time, but at a slower pace. Prevalence of Frozen Forms in ASD 3 Introduction Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) refers to a group of developmental disorders most commonly marked by impairments in social interaction, communication, stereotyped behavior or interests, and manifestation of these symptoms before the age of three (DSM IV-TR, APA 2000). Accompanying the impairments in communication of those children with ASD are deficits in language acquisition. These symptoms are nearly universal across diagnoses of ASD and have been the subject of study in the past (Tek, Mesite, Fein & Naigles 2013). Previous research has revealed that children with ASD demonstrate remarkable strength at grammatical comprehension of language, but suffer from difficulties with the pragmatic aspects of communication (Naigles & Chin 2015). These pragmatic difficulties further manifest themselves as difficulties with abstraction of conceptual language across contexts (Kelley, Paul, Fein, & Naigles 2006). Additionally, children with ASD often fail to demonstrate word learning biases that enable typically developing (TD) children to learn language at an exponentially rapid rate (Naigles, Kelley, Troyb, & Fein 2013). All of these general deficits in autistic language acquisition are well documented, but the prevalence of specific, disordered manifestations of language are not. With the exception of Naigles, Cheng, Rattanasone, Tek, Khetrapal, Fein, & Demuth (2016), very little research has focused on exactly how children with ASD manifest language differently from their TD counterparts in terms of specific errors and learning differences. The purpose of this study was to empirically investigate a specific form of possible language deficit in children with ASD using an original coding paradigm, and to compare it to the speech of TD children. ASD refers to a spectrum of disorders ranging in severity from mild to severe (Landa 2008). Exact symptoms can vary, however social impairments and delayed language acquisition are common to nearly all diagnoses. Deficits with attention and lack of interest in Prevalence of Frozen Forms in ASD 4 other people are common symptoms as well. These symptoms can take many forms, ranging from difficulties maintaining conversation, lacking a “theory of mind,” the ability to attribute mental states to others, and even total withdrawal from social interactions in the most severe cases (White, Keonig, & Scahill 2007). Additionally, assessing children under 12-24 months for autism spectrum disorder can be very difficult as both comprehension and production are very hard to observe in natural settings in both children with ASD and TD children (Charman, Drew, Baird, & Baird 2003). Many standardized language measures are often not effective until later ages, at around two to five years of age, at which point gaps in language development between a child with ASD and their TD peers become evident. In particular, children with ASD frequently demonstrate fundamental impairments in nonverbal, pragmatic communication, which most often manifest as difficulties with joint attention (Sigman & Ruskin 1999). TD children can typically be seen demonstrating competence in these nonverbal communication abilities before the age of five. However, the delays in language production in ASD do not necessarily indicate that there is a comprehension deficit. Delays in language production in ASD often do not necessarily reflect underlying deficiencies in linguistic abilities. Goodwin, Fein, and Naigles (2012) examined whether delays in the production of “wh-questions,” which are interrogative questions where “wh-words” take the place of missing information, in children with ASD was the result of grammatical or pragmatic impairments. In a longitudinal study comparing both children with ASD and TD children using the Intermodal Preferential Looking paradigm (IPL), it was found that both groups demonstrated comprehension of wh-questions well before their production. The ASD and TD groups were able to consistently comprehend questions involving both subjects (“What hit the apple?”) and objects/themes(“What did the apple hit?), although the ASD group did so at a later age than the TD group. Prevalence of Frozen Forms in ASD 5 However, Goodwin, Fein, and Naigles (2015) examined the children’s wh-question comprehension in relation to their mother’s input, and reported that children with ASD seemed to often memorize wh-questions in unanalyzed “frozen chunks” before using them in a more productive form. The researchers found a positive correlation between maternal usage of wh-questions with verbs, which typically occur in the context of complete sentences, and the children with ASD’s later comprehension of wh-questions in an IPL paradigm test. The authors suspected that this was due to the fact that wh-questions that occur in the context of complete sentences, (“Where are you going?”), carry useful information about morphosyntax, as well as the different pragmatic uses for wh-questions. However, excessive maternal uses of more fragmentary wh-question forms, (“What else?”), were actually correlated with worse performance on wh-question comprehension tests in ASD children. The authors believed this was because these sorts of wh-questions are homogenous in their syntactic form, making them very easy to memorize by rote. These relatively simple language forms can easily be memorized and used by a child with ASD without understanding its intent or parsing it for meaning. Furthermore, if these fragmentary wh-question forms are often utilized by caregivers, the more the child with ASD will treat as them as routine sayings, without the need for further analysis. Instead of understanding the pragmatic meaning of a phrase such as “What’s that,” it is used by the child with ASD as a simple cue to name an indicated item. However, while the authors noted the presence of these “frozen chunks,” or unanalyzed language forms, they did not examine the actual prevalence of this phenomena. However, while both children with ASD and TD children are similar in many ways in their capacity for language acquisition, there may still be learning differences between the two groups. This is most evident in the unique language errors found in children with ASD. For example, Naigles et. al. (2016) investigated the prevalence of pronoun reversals in Prevalence of Frozen Forms in ASD 6 children with ASD. Pronoun reversal refers to using the incorrect pronoun in a sentence (“You want some milk” instead of “I want some milk”) and is an often-cited phenomena in the speech of children with autism. Using a pronoun correctly is a complex, linguistic and pragmatic process, requiring knowledge of the number, case, and person of a sentence. As children with ASD’s language comprehension often outpaces their social development, this error is likely to result due to difficulties with perspective-taking. The results found that the ASD group did produce significantly greater numbers of pronoun reversals than the TD group (p=.001). Of the total utterances produced by the children with ASD , approximately 6.42% were pronoun reversals at visits 1-3, and 4.15% of their utterances were pronoun reversals in visits 4-6. This is in comparison to the TD children, whose total usage of pronoun reversals comprised 1.67% of their total utterances in visits 1-3, and 0.68% of their total utterances in visits 4-6. However, while the children with ASD produced greater numbers of pronoun reversals than their TD counterparts, their actual prevalence was quite low. Additionally, their usage decreased over time in both groups, and did not occur with any sort of consistency within the ASD group. This is likely an indication that further research is required to determine whether such errors truly occur consistently in ASD. The topic of the current study was an attempt to fill this gap for a particular language error also frequently cited in descriptions of language use in children with ASD, “frozen” language forms. Frozen, or unanalyzed, language forms are essentially words and phrases that are memorized “verbatim” and used across multiple contexts. For example, when requesting a desired item from a caregiver, a TD child might use such diverse forms as “Can I have that,” “Give me that,” “Are you using that,” or “Please, may I have that?” The diversity in forms indicates an understanding that each form has an equivalent meaning, and that each form Prevalence of Frozen Forms in ASD 7 would be appropriate in the given situation. However, a child with ASD may, for example, use the form “I want that” in every situation. Although the |
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| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1520&context=srhonors_theses |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
