A primary emphasis involves qualitative investigation of pragmatic language variables, especially spontaneous communicative attempts. Intervention studies follow up in this area using single subject experimental and descriptive designs to establish effectiveness of naturalistic approaches to language intervention for children with autism. Videotapes of children s language are collected to establish baseline, and then a particular area is selected for intervention. Videos of intervention are collected and transcribed to track progress. Two areas of particular theoretical significance investigated in these projects are joint attention and commenting, seen as keys to communicative competence in persons with autism.
Young children are amazing in their abilities to learn new words that they overhear in adult speech.
They are are really good at doing this with nouns and descriptive words. However, verbs appear to be more difficult. This program of research is designed to compare the abilities of children at different ages to learn new verbs from incidental exposure. We are also interested in determining the initial representations that children form when learning new verbs and how those compare to adult representations. Normal speech variability.