Joint Attention and Language Development in Children with Autism and Children with Developmental Delay

Although typically developing one- and two-year olds learn new words at an astounding rate, the process of establishing word-to-world links is not simple. Children must gather a variety of information from different sensory modalities in their surrounding environment about the current social situation and use their knowledge of how language is used in order to correctly map a word onto its referent. Along with other social-communicative behaviors, joint attention plays a pivotal role in the development of early word-mapping abilities as it allows children to jointly experience social situations and understand that a speaker’s utterance is used to label the object to which both communicative participants are attending. Joint attention is a part of a broad range of social-communicative skills that children with autism often lack, further preventing them from participating in the social world around them. Given the strong relationship between joint attention and early language acquisition, it is not surprising that children with autism often experience delays in both joint attention and early word learning. Children with other developmental disabilities, however, do not exhibit the consistent impairments in joint attention and language acquisition that are characteristic of children with autism. This study was conducted in order to further investigate the relationship between joint attention and language ability in children with disabilities, comparing children with autism to children with non-autism related developmental delay. Each participant in this study was evaluated in his or her ability to initiate and respond to joint attention. A variety of assessments were used to determine each participant’s concurrent expressive and receptive language abilities, along with these abilities one to seven years later. Thus, the joint attention and language abilities of the group of children with autism were compared to those of the group of children with developmental delay. Additionally, each child was compared to himself or herself across two different time points in order to determine whether a long-term association between joint attention and language ability exists in these two populations. Statistical analyses reveal that, in both groups, children that initiated and responded to joint attention more often had higher measures of concurrent spontaneous language production, which was used to determine their expressive language abilities, and more advanced receptive language abilities at the same time point. However, the associations between these two developmental variables were always stronger in children with autism than in children with developmental delay. These findings suggest that joint attention plays a different role in the expressive and receptive language development in children with autism than it does in children with developmental delay. The importance of joint attention to early language acquisition was not only apparent in the short term. Higher levels of joint attention predicted subsequent language development later in time. In children with autism, one’s ability to initiate joint attention was correlated with higher expressive and receptive language abilities later on in life. Additionally, better rates of responses to joint attention were predictive of receptive language ability one to seven years later in both children with autism and children with developmental delay. Since ability to initiate and respond to joint attention is crucial for language acquisition, it is important to understand how impairments in joint attention contribute to subsequent expressive and receptive language delays. Understanding deficits in joint attention and their subsequent effects on social-communicative development in both children with autism and children with developmental delay may provide us with valuable information on how to develop more effective intervention strategies for children with disabilities.