Exploring Concurrent Interrelations Between Symbolic and Social-Cognitive Domains in Autistic and Neurotypical Children
Creators: name: Carter, Cheriece
Publisher: name: Lancaster University
Year: 2024

description: To advance understanding of relationships between symbolic communication
 systems, this thesis examines concurrent predictive associations between
 social-cognitive skills, picture comprehension and production, and
 symbolic play in autistic and neurotypical children. As social
 communication and language abilities are intimately related in early
 neurotypical development, and may provide a vital scaffold for play and
 pictorial domains, delays and differences in these scaffolding bases –
 such as those commonly observed in autism – could have critical downstream
 consequences for non-linguistic symbolic domains. Studies 1 and 2
 investigate predictive relationships between symbolic domains (social
 communication, play, and pictures) and other individual differences (e.g.
 language abilities, non-verbal intelligence, and fine motor skills) in
 neurotypical 2–5-year-olds (Study 1) and language-delayed autistic
 4–11-year-olds (Study 2). Study 1 reports bidirectional interrelationships
 between pictorial, play, and social communication domains, suggesting that
 these modules of symbolic development may be underpinned by shared factors
 in neurotypical children. In Study 2, pictorial and symbolic play
 abilities were bidirectionally related, and both these domains were
 predicted by social communication and/or social scaffolding, although
 proficiency in play and pictorial domains did not appear to reciprocally
 contribute to social communication abilities.
 
 
 Study 3 explores whether there are differences in the presence, direction,
 and magnitude of predictive relationships between symbolic domains in
 autistic and neurotypical children matched on language comprehension (M
 age equivalent = autistic: 44.11 months; neurotypical: 44.30 months).
 Although social communication skills predicted play and pictorial
 abilities in neurotypical children, this was not observed in autistic
 children. Evidence for possible relationships between play and pictorial
 domains was identified in neurotypical children, but not autistic
 children. These findings suggest that non-linguistic
 
 17
 
 symbol systems (e.g. play and pictures) in neurotypical children are
 interdependent and mediated by social-cognitive abilities. However, in
 autistic children, symbolic domains may be relatively independent and the
 lack of relationships with social communication skills potentially
 implicates a different route to acquiring symbol systems. Study 4 examines
 how autistic children and language-matched neurotypical children (M age
 equivalent = autistic: 43.60 months; neurotypical: 44.75 months) learn
 novel vocabulary from pictures and how this is influenced by iconicity
 (i.e. the extent to which a symbol resembles its intended referent).
 Autistic children achieved significantly greater retention accuracy when
 learning object names from highly iconic colour photographs compared to
 less iconic black-and-white cartoons and, surprisingly, responded more
 accurately than neurotypical children when learning from photographs.
 These findings suggest that learning words from pictures may be more
 cognitively challenging for neurotypical children than learning words from
 objects, and that autistic children benefit from greater iconicity when
 learning words from pictures.
 
 
 Overall, this thesis demonstrates differences in the relatedness of
 symbolic domains between populations. Play and pictures were consistently
 interrelated and supported by social communicative abilities in both
 neurotypical and autistic children. While bidirectional relationships
 between social communication, play, and pictures were observed in
 neurotypical children, this was not the case for autism. Direct population
 comparisons involving language-matched participants drawn from both
 populations suggest that understanding of non-linguistic symbols is
 interdependent and mediated by social-cognitive abilities in neurotypical
 children. In contrast, symbolic domains appeared to be relatively more
 independent and less consistently scaffolded by social skills in autism.
 At an applied level, these results have important implications for the
 design/delivery of early education practices and clinical interventions,
 and provide a data-grounded rationale for using colour photographs when
 administering picture-based interventions for autistic individuals.