Failure to learn from feedback underlies word learning difficulties in toddlers at risk for autism.
J Child Lang
; 40(1): 29-46, 2013 Jan.
Article
in En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-23217290
ABSTRACT
Children's assignment of novel words to nameless objects, over objects whose names they know (mutual exclusivity; ME) has been described as a driving force for vocabulary acquisition. Despite their ability to use ME to fast-map words (Preissler & Carey, 2005), children with autism show impaired language acquisition. We aimed to address this puzzle by building on studies showing that correct referent selection using ME does not lead to word learning unless ostensive feedback is provided on the child's object choice (Horst & Samuelson, 2008). We found that although toddlers aged 2;0 at risk for autism can use ME to choose the correct referent of a word, they do not benefit from feedback for long-term retention of the word-object mapping. Further, their difficulty using feedback is associated with their smaller receptive vocabularies. We propose that difficulties learning from social feedback, not lexical principles, limits vocabulary building during development in children at risk for autism.
Full text:
1
Collection:
01-internacional
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Autistic Disorder
/
Feedback, Psychological
/
Language Development
Type of study:
Etiology_studies
/
Risk_factors_studies
Limits:
Child, preschool
/
Female
/
Humans
/
Male
Language:
En
Journal:
J Child Lang
Year:
2013
Document type:
Article
Affiliation country:
United kingdom