Undergraduate Research Journal of Psychology at UCLA

Evidence shows that parents enhance their child’s word learning abilities by providing labels to novel objects and including descriptions. This evidence has been applied to interventions for parents of children with attentional difficulties and developmental disabilities, urging parents to simplify their language input to increase their child’s attention during parent-child interactions. Using parent-child transcripts from the CHILDES database, this project investigated whether there are any differences in labeling and description use between typical and at-risk infants. This study used data from Quigley and McNally’s (2013) study involving ten typically developing infants with no known developmental risk factors and no family history of autism and nine at-risk infants who had an older sibling diagnosed with autism. We found that when mothers’ total number of utterances (i.e., how talkative the mother was) were controlled, mothers’ labeling between both groups were marginally different (p = 0.053) with mothers in the high-risk group providing less labels than mothers in the low-risk group. Additionally, a significant difference was found in how parents used descriptions with mothers in the high-risk group providing less descriptions compared to mothers in the low-risk group (p = 0.005). These results show that parents of children that are at high-risk of developing autism adjusted their communicative frame to fit their children’s needs, specifically by providing fewer complex sentences to create a simplistic way of introducing and describing new words to their child’s environment. This strategy underscores previous findings showcasing the presence of attentional deficits present in children with autism.