(Montreal) Autistic people could learn language differently than neurotypical children, concludes a meta-analysis which invites specialists to study language outside of the autistic and non-autistic comparison.
The analysis, which brings together 71 studies published since 1994, was carried out by professor in the department of psychiatry and addictology at the University of Montreal, Laurent Mottron, Ariane St-Denis, medical student at McGill University and Mikhail Kissine, professor of linguistics at the Free University of Brussels.
Their study concludes that children with autism can acquire language while having low levels of joint attention, a factor that is essential in language learning in neurotypical people.
What is joint attention? This is the process by which, for example, a parent will point out a bird to their child and say: “Look, it’s a bird”. The child’s attention will therefore be focused on the same object as that designated by his father, with which he will associate the word “bird”.
“This is one of the clearest and very early characteristics of autism, which we see from the end of the first year of life, in a very robust way, is that this joint attention is less present or not present at all,” explains Laurent Mottron, contacted from Brussels.
“Children with autism, for example, will tend to pay much less attention to their gaze, whereas to establish joint attention, you need to be able to follow the gaze of others,” he continues.
The professor indicates that the lack of joint attention in autistic people is a “very likely” cause of their delay in learning language.
“Around 60% of autistic children at three years old do not speak, or speak very little,” specifies Mr. Kissine.
However, “if we look at what happens around the age of seven to nine, there are many children who have developed language. They have made up for this delay,” specifies the professor. Their study therefore questioned whether autistic children who have more joint attention are more likely to speak.
In the end, “what we realize is that, yes, joint attention is very important in autism, it actually plays a pivotal role, in the sense [où] children who have little or no joint attention are more likely to miss early stages of language,” Kissine says.
“But what we also see, when we examine all this scientific literature, and what is very interesting, and a little challenging, is that there are also clearly cases to be tested of autistic children who acquire language, which reach levels that are very high […] when they otherwise have low levels of joint attention, or they don’t have documented instances of joint attention,” he adds.
The meta-analysis therefore concludes that autistic children still acquire language, despite their lack of joint attention.
However, more research is needed to determine how children with autism learn to speak.
For example, studies have shown cases of autistic children who learn a language that is not spoken around them, solely through exposure to screens, Mr. Kissine illustrates. Some research also reports cases of hyperlexic autistic children, that is to say, who have an early mastery of written language compared to their oral language.
“These are individual cases that I think we should better document to better understand, on the one hand, what are the motivational factors, what motivates these children to acquire language when they cannot use it to communicate around them, and on the other hand, try to understand how they do it,” maintains Mr. Kissine.
The professor therefore invites researchers to “keep an open mind”, emphasizing that we do not always have to focus on the development of a non-autistic child to understand the language development of an autistic person.