Abstract
Autism spectrum disorder is a condition resulting from abnormal brain development. The key impacts of the disease are one’s inability to socialize with other individuals and altered perception of the surrounding social environment. Further, affected patients exhibit patterns of repetitive and limited behaviors. The first effects of the disease present themselves in early childhood. The literature review revealed that the communication capabilities of affected children are poorly studied. Therefore, children with autism spectrum disorder will be studied on their verbal speech, dialogue, and interpersonal communication skills. The research asks what developmental indicators in communication are found in children with ASD. The methodology will focus on the parameters such as verbal empathy, focus on the topic of the conversation, taking natural dialogue turns, conversation engagement, and body language, specifically eye contact. The expected results include echolalia, inattentiveness, low engagement, and avoidance of eye contact.
Purpose
The purpose of the research is to assess the communication skills of children with autism spectrum disorder by assessing their ability to converse effectively within a dialogue framework. The study will provide a superior assessment and evaluation metric to understand the disease’s implications on the core socialization aspect – interpersonal communication. The proposed research will focus on analyzing communication parameters: verbal empathy, focus on the topic of the conversation, taking natural dialogue turns, conversation engagement, and body language, specifically eye contact.
Research Questions
- In what developmental milestones of communication do children with autism spectrum disorder lag behind the unaffected ones?
- Which specific indicators of the communication and conversation were lacking or incomplete in the examination process?
Expected Outcomes
The hypothesis is that children with autism spectrum disorder do not fully develop key communication milestones, such as verbal empathy, focusing on the topic of the conversation, taking natural dialogue turns, conversation engagement, and body language, specifically eye contact.
It is expected that children with ASD might:
- Exhibit delayed developments of the key communication milestone indicators, such as the lack of engagement, the lack of eye contact, the inability to facilitate the conversation, and the inability to exhibit empathy verbally.
- Perceive tasks as uninteresting.
- Manifest echolalia.
- Have behavioral deviations in communication since childhood (based on parents’ answers).
- Largely avoid playing with other children, interacting, and communicating with strangers.
- For a long time, they did not respond to their name or not respond to the appeal and conversation of people in proximity except for the parent.
Prior Research
One of the key features of autism spectrum disorder is impaired social skills, which requires a more in-depth assessment. Autism spectrum disorder’s manifestations can vary since there is a divergence in severity and behavioral patterns. However, the most evident symptoms involve socialization, especially speech and communication. The disorder shows signs usually when a child reaches two years of age, and the initial months might appear normal (Hollander et al., 2022). Gillion et al. (2017) state that autism spectrum disorder has a worldwide median incidence of 62 in 10 000 people and does not ‘favor’ any geographic region and socioeconomic or ethnic group. Broome et al. (2017) suggest that the difference in the prelinguistic vocalizations of young children subsequently diagnosed with ASD may be an important positive behavioral marker characterizing this disorder. Since these communicative indicators may be key in analyzing autism, the proposed research will assess the interpersonal communication competencies and abilities of children with the condition.
However, the challenges of the assessment process must be evaluated. Broome et al. (2017) state that since many children with ASD utilize self-directed or context-specific communication, they may find it particularly difficult to demonstrate their abilities during formal assessments. Therefore, it is vital to properly investigate the condition’s impact on a child’s communication skills. Stevenson et al. (2017) suggest that autistic children have decreased auditory, visual, and audiovisual capacities compared to typically developing (TD) children. In addition, Stevenson et al. (2017) state that autistic children do not benefit from multisensory integration as much as their TD peers do, even when accounting for differences in visual lip-reading abilities. Therefore, in working with children with autism, the engagement of multiple senses is not effective since they perceive speech with more difficulty than TD children.
Methods
The methodology will be based on an interview process of 20 children aged 5-7 years old, half being children with the disorder. The conversation and toy composition will be adjusted around the preferences and topics of interest suggested by parents. The analysis will use the scoring system based on eye contact, conversation engagement, turn-taking in the dialogue, focus on the conversation topic, and verbal empathy. Therefore, the script will pose questions and statements designed to invoke these responses to test the selected indicators among children with and without ASD.
To ensure that children are given a positive environment for engagement, several tasks are prepared to test the indicators. The core approach is based on Applied Behavior Analysis, or ABA, which is designed to study behavior and learning (Hollander et al., 2022). Within this approach, two major tasks were identified for a successful evaluation.
- Learn how a child can make up a dialogue. The procedure will be based on prepared pictures depicting situations and characters, where the task is to determine what they do and what they can talk about.
- Two points: the child conducts a dialogue on behalf of several characters, and in the dialogue, there are more than three persons of the dialogue, extensive speech turns are used.
- One point: the child can hold a maximum of three dialogue characters, has poor speech patterns and does not show interest.
- Zero points: the child selects only the topic displayed in the pictures and cannot dialogue.
- Investigate which cues children use more often in speech, stimuli, or reactions. The procedure for conducting this is a conversation on how the child’s day went, where the child would also be requested to ask how the day went with the examiner.
- Two points: the child equally promotes communication and responds to reactions, actively participating in the dialogue.
- One point: the child responds more frequently to reactions, uses little to promote communication, and is easily distracted.
- Zero points: responses are small, there is no progress in communication, and speech is passive
Limitations
A potential limitation is that ABA is designed to be individualized. Since the approach can be modified to suit the child, it may be harder to present generalized research conclusions. Additionally, even though the research space will be accommodated in accordance with parents’ specifications, the stress of the interview may nonetheless affect children’s comfort. Thus, children’s communicative skills may somewhat differ in situations where they are completely relaxed.
References
Broome, K., McCabe, P., Docking, K., & Doble, M. (2017). A systematic review of speech assessments for children with autism spectrum disorder: Recommendations for best practice. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 26(3), 1011- 1029. Web.
Gillon, G., Hyter, Y., Fernandes, F. D., Ferman, S., Hus, Y., Petinou, K., Segal, O., Tumanova, T., Vogindroukas, I., Westby, C., & Westerveld, M. (2017). An international survey of speech-language pathologists’ practices in working with children with autism spectrum disorder. Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica, 69(1-2), 8–19. Web.
Hollander, E., Hagerman, R., & Ferretti, C. (2022). Textbook of autism spectrum disorders. American Psychiatric Association Publishing.
Stevenson, R. A., Baum, S. H., Segers, M., Ferber, S., Barense, M. D., & Wallace, M. T. (2017). Multisensory speech perception in autism spectrum disorder: From phoneme to whole-word perception. Autism Research, 10(7), 1280–1290. Web.