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Gepubliceerd in: Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 10/2016

03-03-2015 | Original Paper

Attentional Learning Helps Language Acquisition Take Shape for Atypically Developing Children, Not Just Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Auteurs: Charlotte Field, Melissa L. Allen, Charlie Lewis

Gepubliceerd in: Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders | Uitgave 10/2016

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Abstract

The shape bias—generalising labels to same shaped objects—has been linked to attentional learning or referential intent. We explore these origins in children with typical development (TD), autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and other developmental disorders (DD). In two conditions, a novel object was presented and either named or described. Children selected another from a shape, colour or texture match. TD children choose the shape match in both conditions, children with DD and ‘high-verbal mental age’ (VMA) children with ASD (language age > 4.6) did so in the name condition and ‘low-VMA’ children with ASD never showed the heuristic. Thus, the shape bias arises from attentional learning in atypically developing children and is delayed in ASD.
Voetnoten
1
With two exceptions, all of the DD children had also received a formal diagnosis of their disorder. The data was not excluded from the study from the two DD-low VMA children who had not been officially diagnosed with any DD because, in addition to attending a specialist school, their VMA (3.67 and 3.75 respectively) was considerably younger than their CA (10.75 and 10.83 respectively). The possibility that these children had undiagnosed ASD was ruled out by both children scoring below the clinical threshold for ASD on both the CARS and SCQ questionnaires.
 
2
Two ASD-low VMA children had a raw score on the BPVS below the basal start point of 2.33. However, as both children were very close to this start point, they were conservatively assigned VMA’s of 2.25 and 2.00 based upon their raw score. For example, the child who was assigned a VMA of 2.25 had a raw score of 14 on the BPVS, where a raw score of 15 equates to a VMA of 2.33. As the shape bias is present by two-years-old in TD children, these participants were not excluded from the study.
 
3
Fourteen out of the sixteen stimuli had been modified from kitchen or household equipment (e.g. covering a bowl scraper with pink tissue paper, see Fig. 1), therefore would not have been seen by any of the children before. The two remaining stimuli consisted of unusual kitchen equipment, which children were very unlikely to be familiar with (the lemon juicer included in Fig. 1 and a utensil hook). No child volunteered a name for any of the stimuli. Thus, we could be reasonably confident that the objects were novel to the children.
 
4
If the more stringent Bonferroni correction is applied, using the alpha value of .008 for three groups (six comparisons) and .004 for six groups (twelve comparisons), the results for seventeen out of the eighteen comparisons remain significant, the only exception being the results for the DD-low VMA children. However, we did not do this following recent criticism against correcting for multiple t tests on the grounds that this procedure inflates the risk of type 11 errors (e.g. Nakagawa 2004; Rothman 1990) or is simply not necessary (Perneger 1998).
 
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Metagegevens
Titel
Attentional Learning Helps Language Acquisition Take Shape for Atypically Developing Children, Not Just Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders
Auteurs
Charlotte Field
Melissa L. Allen
Charlie Lewis
Publicatiedatum
03-03-2015
Uitgeverij
Springer US
Gepubliceerd in
Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders / Uitgave 10/2016
Print ISSN: 0162-3257
Elektronisch ISSN: 1573-3432
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-015-2401-1

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