Autistic children learn language through completely different mechanisms from those of so-called neurotypical children (considered normal), confirms an analysis of studies carried out over the last 30 years. This observation therefore calls into question the interventions practiced until now to help them acquire oral language.
“All interventions in autism had the principle and aim of increasing the joint attention of autistic children, who are completely deprived of it,” emphasizes from the outset the Dr Laurent Mottron, professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Addictology at the University of Montreal.
All neurotypical humans generally have a social bias towards their peers. Babies learn to speak by paying attention to what comes out of their parents’ mouths. And they use what’s called joint attention, which is looking where the other person is looking. If the mother says: “Ah! A cat ! » looking at the feline that passes by, the neurotypical child will follow his mother’s gaze and, seeing the cat, he will be able to paste the word cat to this animal, explains the Dr Mottron.
“Joint attention is a genetically encoded function that appears very important for language learning in typical young children. This is a function that is specific to many mammals. When a cow looks in one direction, the other cows imitate it,” he emphasizes.
Joint attention, however, is only useful for a fairly short period of time, because once language has started in a child, it is no longer necessary. The proof: three-year-old children are often real talkers, he points out.
Autistic toddlers, on the other hand, are not interested in what their mothers watch. So they don’t demonstrate joint attention, and they don’t talk about it at all from the age of two to four. Over the next two years, they begin to repeat words. And little by little, the majority of them will end up speaking. About one in five will almost never use verbal language.
The Dr Mottron co-authors an article in the October edition of the journal Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews which demonstrates that there is no link between the level of joint attention that autistic children exhibit at a very young age and the level of language that they reach later in life. And as a result, the absence of joint attention in autistic children – without intellectual disability – does not prevent them from acquiring advanced levels of language, because 80% of them still end up speaking correctly . However, they arrive there later than the others, and by using learning mechanisms different from those used by the latter, say the authors of the article.
Autistic children learn letters and numbers self-taught on the tablet, their favorite tool. “They have a sort of attraction to letters and numbers. We don’t have to show them that it’s important, because an autistic person won’t look at what we point out to him as important,” explains Dr.r Mottron.
Half of the autistic population knows the alphabet at three years old, while even a child with high intellectual potential, with an IQ of 140, begins at four years old. We have seen autistic children who can read words, the meaning of which they obviously do not understand, at three years old, which is extremely rare among neurotypical children, relates this autism specialist.
“Autistic children enter language through writing rather than orally like “typical” children. For the typical child, oral learning is implicit, while written learning is explicit and is learned in school. With autistic people, it’s almost the opposite, it’s the written word that is implicit and afterwards, we sometimes have to give them speech therapy so that they can make the connection between written and spoken words. », summarizes the Dr Mottron.
Another observation that supports the hypothesis that autistic children do not pick up language from watching their parents speak is the example of five autistic Tunisian children who spoke Modern Standard Arabic, which is only used in politics and on television, but people don’t talk at home. “These children mastered a language which was not that of their parents”, underlines the Dr Mottron.
“We believe that autistic people also have these language analyzers that Chomsky described and which allow us to recognize syntactic structures and learn them. But autistic people find them in what they have access to, namely code written on the tablet. Then, they end up realizing that this language that they learned in a purely formal way can also be used to ask for a pear when they want a pear,” says the researcher.
The big idea that emerges from this study is therefore that it is futile to try to develop joint attention in autistic children in the hope that they will acquire language like other children. “You cannot imagine the amount of time and mental sweat that was spent [dans cette optique]. Using the Denver method, created by psychologists Sally Rogers and Géraldine Dawson, for 30 hours a week was a complete failure! » he says.
His team offers a completely different approach, namely “a lateral tutoring system” in which the caregiver carries out an activity alongside the child that has as much in common with what the child spontaneously does himself. “If the child has access on his tablet to the same nursery rhymes, puzzles, or word-thing matching games that you do next to him, he will be seen doing the same things a few days later. Not right away, because autistic people refuse to imitate when asked. He simply needs to have access to information [écrite] and then they manage,” explains Dr.r Mottron.