Joint Attention and Language Development in Children with Autism and Children with Developmental Delay
Creators: name: Ollinger, Anna
Publisher: name: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries
Year: 2013

description: 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.