INCREASING COMMUNICATIVE INTERACTIONS OF YOUNG CHILDREN WITH AUTISM USING A VOICE OUTPUT COMMUNICATION AID AND NATURALISTIC TEACHING

We evaluated the effects of a voice output communication aid (VOCA) and naturalistic teaching procedures on the communicative interactions of young children with autism. A teacher and three assistants were taught to use naturalistic teaching strategies to provide opportunities for VOCA use in the context of regularly occurring classroom routines. Naturalistic teaching procedures and VOCA use were introduced in multiple probe fashion across 4 children and two classroom routines (snack and play). As the procedures were implemented, all children showed increases in communicative interactions using VOCAs. Also, there was no apparent reductive effect of VOCA use within the naturalistic teaching paradigm on other communicative behaviors. Teachers' ratings of children's VOCA communication, as well as ratings of a person unfamiliar with the children, supported the contextual appropriateness of the VOCA. Probes likewise indicated that the children used the VOCAs for a variety of different messages including requests, yes and no responses, statements, and social comments. Results are discussed in regard to the potential benefits of a VOCA when combined with naturalistic teaching procedures. Future research needs are also discussed, focusing on more precise identification of the attributes of VOCA use for children with autism, as well as for their support personnel.     

Communicative depth: soundings from developmental psychopathology

My aim in this paper is to consider what it means to engage and communicate with another person. I do so by adopting the approach of developmental psychopathology, and compare and contrast the structure of communication that is manifest by typically developing infants on the one hand, and by children and adolescents with autism on the other. I highlight the pivotal significance of human beings' propensity to share or otherwise co-ordinate experiences with others, and analyze the conditions that make sharing and other forms of intersubjective relatedness possible. Often, discussions that oppose cognitive, affective, and motivational accounts of autism are pursued in an inappropriate frame of reference: at root, we need to understand the nature and developmental implications of affected children's difficulties in achieving communicative depth. In the pursuit of such understanding, we may gain insights into typically developing infants' capacities for intersubjective engagement.     

差距知觉的泛化效应：我和你之间的差距有多大?

当知晓自己和他人的表现,即自己与他人在某方面表现上的差距已经明确时,人们对自我-他人差异的知觉准确吗?本研究发现了差距知觉的泛化效应：人们将自身的绝对表现(自己的表现与零相比的结果)泛化到对自身相对表现(自己与他人相比的结果)的判断上。在7个研究中, 被试(N = 2766)得知自己的绝对表现和相对于他人的表现,并判断自己与他人之间的差距。结果显示,绝对获益时,人们在相对获益时感知到的自我-他人差距大于相对损失时;绝对损失时,人们在相对获益时感知到的自我-他人差距小于相对损失时;当泛化难以进行时,上述效应消失。研究揭示了差距知觉的泛化效应及其联结机制。     

Motor Imitation in Young Children with Autism: What's the Object?

Two studies investigated the nature of motor imitation in young children with autism. Study 1 compared different types of motor imitation in 18 autistic children, 18 children with developmental delay, and 18 normally developing children. Results revealed weaker imitation skills for the autistic group, though all groups demonstrated a similar pattern of performance across different imitation domains. Imitation of body movements was more difficult than imitation of actions with objects, and imitation of nonmeaningful actions was more difficult than imitation of meaningful actions. Study 2 investigated concurrent and predictive relations between imitation and other developmental skills within a sample of 26 two-year-old children with autism. Results suggested that imitation of body movements and imitation of actions with objects represent independent dimensions. Imitation of body movements was concurrently and predictively associated with expressive language skills, and imitation of actions with objects was concurrently associated with play skills. Improvements in both motor imitation domains occurred over a 1-year period.     

Young children are intrinsically motivated to see others helped

Young children help other people, but it is not clear why. In the current study, we found that 2-year-old children's sympathetic arousal, as measured by relative changes in pupil dilation, is similar when they themselves help a person and when they see that person being helped by a third party (and sympathetic arousal in both cases is different from that when the person is not being helped at all). These results demonstrate that the intrinsic motivation for young children's helping behavior does not require that they perform the behavior themselves and thus "get credit" for it, but rather requires only that the other person be helped. Thus, from an early age, humans seem to have genuine concern for the welfare of others.     

Social transmission of disinhibition in young children

The present study examined whether young children's behaviors in the Dimensional Change Card Sorting task can be influenced by their observation of another person performing the task. Experiment 1 showed that after children watched an adult sorting cards according to one rule, although the children were instructed to sort the cards according to a new rule, most 3-year-olds made perseverative errors and used the observed, old rule to sort the cards instead of the new rule. However, only some 4-year-olds and few 5-year-olds made the same mistake. Experiments 2, 3 and 4 showed that the younger children took into consideration social pragmatic information displayed by the adult model when deciding to use the old rule or the new rule. When the model appeared to know that she sorted the cards incorrectly (Experiments 2 and 3), or was uncertain whether she sorted cards correctly (Experiment 4), most 3-year-olds no longer committed perseverative errors. When the adult model was confident about her sorting or oblivious to her sorting errors, most 3-year-olds made perseverative errors. These results taken together suggest that social observation can lead to disinhibitions. In other words, disinhibition can be transmitted socially from one person to another.     

幼儿的自我投射能力对情景预见的影响:来自典型发展儿童和孤独症谱系障碍儿童的证据

情景预见是个体将自我投射到未来某个特定时间和地点预先体验可能发生的未来事件的一种能力。为了考察幼儿的自我投射能力在情景预见中的可能作用,本研究通过两个实验比较了从自己的视角和从他人视角完成情景预见任务时幼儿的表现。实验1选取236名3~5.5岁典型发展（Typically Developing,TD）幼儿,采用被试间设计发现,总体而言,幼儿为他人做预见优于为自己做预见。实验2采用被试内设计,在TD儿童身上验证了实验1的结果,同时发现,孤独症谱系障碍（Autism Spectrum Disorder,ASD）儿童为自己做预见与为他人做预见没有差异。综上,幼儿不成熟的自我投射能力会干扰其自我卷入的情景预见,而自我投射能力受损的ASD儿童则没有表现出这种影响。     

Expectancies About the Effects of Alcohol on the Self and on Others as Determinants of Alcohol Policy Attitudes1

The present study brings together 2 separate lines of research in the alcohol field: alcohol expectancies and policy attitudes. Expectancies concerning the short- and long-term effects of drinking (e.g., aggression), were predicted to be stronger determinants of support for alcohol availability control when the target person was another, compared to when discussing effects of one's own drinking. In a population-based survey conducted in 1992, 804 current drinkers were asked about self and other alcohol expectancies, as well as attitudes toward various alcohol policies. Results showed a distinct self-other discrepancy, with people more likely to expect alcohol to have a greater effect over others than over themselves. Further, it was found that these other-expectancies were among the strongest predictors of favoring tighter alcohol controls. These findings lend support to findings of a self-other bias in social psychology, and provide insight as to the structure of public opinion on alcohol policy.     

The effect of social observation on children's inhibitory control

This study examined the effects of social observation on young children's performance during an inhibitory control task. In Experiment 1, children were randomly assigned to either a neutral, facilitation, or interference condition. In the neutral condition, children were presented with a standard black/white task. In the facilitation and interference conditions, children were asked to observe the task performance of another person, who gave either correct (facilitation) or incorrect (interference) responses, and then complete the task themselves. The results revealed that the performance of children in the interference condition was worse than in the other two conditions, but the difference between the two other conditions was not significant. The results of Experiment 2 show that social observation did not facilitate inhibitory control in children. These results suggest that social observation interferes with but does not facilitate inhibitory control in children. Therefore, social observation may interfere with certain aspects of executive function.     

How dogs know when communication is intended for them

Domestic dogs comprehend human gestural communication in a way that other animal species do not. But little is known about the specific cues they use to determine when human communication is intended for them. In a series of four studies, we confronted both adult dogs and young dog puppies with object choice tasks in which a human indicated one of two opaque cups by either pointing to it or gazing at it. We varied whether the communicator made eye contact with the dog in association with the gesture (or whether her back was turned or her eyes were directed at another recipient) and whether the communicator called the dog's name (or the name of another recipient). Results demonstrated the importance of eye contact in human-dog communication, and, to a lesser extent, the calling of the dog's name--with no difference between adult dogs and young puppies--which are precisely the communicative cues used by human infants for identifying communicative intent. Unlike human children, however, dogs did not seem to comprehend the human's communicative gesture when it was directed to another human, perhaps because dogs view all human communicative acts as directives for the recipient.     

Anticipatory concern: a study in autism

There has been substantial research on children's empathic responsiveness towards distressed people, and on the limited responsiveness of children with autism. To date, however, there have not been experimental studies to test how far children show concern towards someone who might be expected to feel badly, when that person has not (yet) expressed any negative feelings. We tested matched groups of children with autism and learning disability, and typically developing children of similar verbal mental age (approximately 6 years), with a novel procedure in which participants witnessed one person (E1) tearing the drawing of another (E2). In a comparison condition, a blank card was torn. In the torn‐drawing condition, as predicted, fewer participants with autism orientated towards E2 with an immediate look, and as a group, they were rated as showing less concern for, and fewer concerned looks towards, E2. We discuss possible implications for theoretical perspectives on the early development of empathy in typically as well as atypically developing children.     

Attention and joint attention in preschool children with autism

Three experiments examined the role of attention in explaining dyadic (child-adult) and triadic (child-adult-object) joint attention difficulties in autism. Experiments 1 and 2 investigated children's ability to orient to an adult's attention bid and to follow the direction of a human or nonhuman cue. Experiment 3 tested ability to disengage and shift attention to objects. Results showed autism-specific difficulties at both dyadic and triadic levels. Children with autism were less responsive than developmentally delayed controls in orienting to attention bids and in following a human head-turn cue yet had no difficulty in shifting attention and were faster overall in orienting to targets. Results suggest a specific developmental delay in which children with autism rely on the presence of objects in the visual field to guide action. The relation between this problem and autistic children's difficulties with human communicative signals is discussed.     

Aspects pragmatiques de la communication et du langage chez des enfants typiques et des enfants ultérieurement diagnostiqués autistes

The aim of this study is to show that the analysis of pragmatic aspects of communication can allow to locate communicative dysfunctions before the diagnosis of autism is established. The identification of these dysfunctions can be done retrospectively through the analysis of the first gestures and early words. Home movies from children having autism and control ones are collected when they were one, two and three-years old. Data analysis takes into account both forms of communicative gestures and words and functions. Differences between the two groups as a less variety of functions used by children having autism and a fall in their results after the age of two are discussed as possible indicators for an early detection of autism.     

Children's avoidance of lexical overlap: a pragmatic account

Children tend to choose an unfamiliar object rather than a familiar one when asked to find the referent of a novel name. This response has been taken as evidence for the operation of certain lexical constraints in children's inferences of word meanings. The present studies test an alternative--pragmatic--explanation of this phenomenon among 3-year-olds. In Study 1 children responded to a request for the referent of a novel label in the same way that they responded to a request for the referent of a novel fact. Study 2 intimated that children assume that labels are common knowledge among members of the same language community. Study 3 demonstrated that shared knowledge between a speaker and listener plays a decisive role in how children interpret a speaker's request. The findings suggest that 3-year-olds' avoidance of lexical overlap is not unique to naming and may derive from children's sensitivity to speakers' communicative intentions.     

Dissociable aspects of imitation: a study in autism

What does it mean for a child to imitate someone else? We tested matched groups of children with and without autism (n=16 for each group, with a mean chronological age of 11 years and a mean verbal mental age of 6 years) to investigate two potentially dissociable aspects of imitation: copying goal-directed actions, on the one hand, and imitating the "style" with which a person demonstrates those actions, on the other. Our hypothesis was that the latter, but not necessarily the former, kind of imitation reflects a special quality of interpersonal engagement in which one person identifies with another, and that the propensity to identify with others is specifically weak in autism. As predicted, participants with and without autism were similar in their ability to copy six relatively complex goal-directed actions but were significantly different in imitating the style with which six simpler goal-directed actions were executed, especially when style was incidental to accomplishing a goal. We interpret the findings in terms of a link among children's capacities for intersubjective engagement, imitation, and learning new ways to relate to objects.     

Children's recoding in memory for collaboration: A way of learning from others

Children made collages with an adult and were later asked to remember who placed particular pieces on the collage. In three experiments, 4-year-olds were more likely to claim they placed pieces actually placed by the adult than the reverse. This bias to claim “I did it” was also observed in response to distractor pieces, but only if those pieces resembled the ones actually used to make the collages (Experiments 1 and 2). When children were asked to think about how the adult would place her pieces while waiting for their turns, the bias was not evident. Only when children thought of themselves performing the adult's actions did the bias occur (Experiment 3). These results are interpreted as evidence that young children recode the actions of other people as their own while thinking about what another person has done or will do. This recoding process is discussed as one mechanism for learning from other people.     

Excuse-making and blaming as a function of internal—external locus of control

Two studies examined differences in excuse-maktg and blaming by subjects with internal or external locus of control. In Study I, 39 internals and 30 externals judged acceptability of various excuses in three situations and also assigned blame for cheating and lying in other situations. Externals were uniformly more prone to use excuses than internals, both for other actors and for themselves. Also, externals tended to assign less blame for cheating and lying. In Study II, 24 internals and 32 externals divided blame among themselves, another person, and ‘no one to blame’ in 10 joint-responsible situations. Externals assigned more blame to the other person and less to themselves, but approximately the same blame to ‘no one’ Externals also had higher tendencies to blame others and were more sensitive to being blamed. These results point to a ‘missing dimension’ of interpersonal relations in studies of excuse-making and blame.     

Psychometric Evaluation of 5- and 7-Year-Old Children's Self-Reports of Conduct Problems

Past research suggests that young children are incapable of reporting information about their own behavior problems. To test this, we examined the validity and the usefulness of children's self-reports in the E-Risk Study, a nationally representative birth cohort of 2,232 children. We used the Berkeley Puppet Interview to obtain children's self-reports of conduct problems when they were 5-years old and the Dominic-R when they were 7-years old. We also collected information about the children and their families by interviewing mothers, sending questionnaires to teachers, and rating examiners' observations during home visits. Results indicate that when children's self-reports are gathered with structured and developmentally appropriate instruments, they are shown to be valid measures: conduct problems reported by the children themselves were associated with known correlates including individual characteristics (e.g., IQ), related behaviors (e.g., hyperactivity), and family variables (e.g., economic disadvantages). Observed correlations closely matched effect sizes reported in the literature using adults' reports of children's behavioral problems. In addition, children's self-reports can be useful: both measures distinguished children meeting DSM-IV criteria for research diagnoses of conduct disorder. Children's reports also contributed unique information not provided by adults. For research and clinical purposes, young children's self-reports can be viewed as a valuable complement to adults' ratings and observational measures of children's behavior problems.