Children with ASD use joint attention and linguistic skill in pronoun development

Abstract

Producing pronouns involves linguistic and social-cognitive knowledge because children must learn words and understand pronouns’ changing referents. This study examined pronoun production longitudinally in young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 15), whose social-cognition might impair pronoun use, and in typically developing (TD; n = 18) children. Modeling the effect of joint attention (JA; a social-cognitive factor) and a name bias (NB; a linguistic factor) revealed a positive relation between NB and second- and third-person pronouns for all children and a positive relation between JA and those pronouns in just the ASD group. Social-cognitive and linguistic processes affected the ability of children with ASD to use pronouns; TD children’s pronouns were related to linguistic skill and unaffected by JA.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 23 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.