Janine Mathée-Scott, M.S., CCC-SLP
Doctoral Student
Communication Sciences and Disorders, UW-Madison
Kathryn Prescott, M.A., CCC-SLP
Doctoral Student
Communication Sciences and Disorders, UW-Madison
Prediction and Early Language in Young Autistic Children
Recent theoretical accounts suggest that differences in the processing of probabilistic events may underlie the core and associated traits of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). These theories hypothesize that autistic individuals are differentially impacted by disruptions in probabilistic input relative to neurotypical (NT) peers. According to this view, autistic individuals assign disproportionate weight to prediction errors such that novel input is overweighted relative to the aggregation of prior input; this is referred to as ‘hyperplasticity’ of learning. Hyperplastic learning may have important implications for autistic children’s language development, as language unfolds in statistically constrained, probabilistic sequences. Prediction among autistic individuals has primarily been examined in nonverbal, visual contexts with older children and adults. The present set of experiments aimed to test whether young autistic children differed from cognitively-matched NT peers in their processing of probabilistic input in a variety of contexts: verbal, visual, and linguistic. Findings from these experiments and implications for theoretical and clinical applications will be discussed.
This work was funded by National Institutes of Health grants NIDCD R01 DC17974 (MPIs: Ellis Weismer & Saffran), F31 DC020902 (PI: Mathée-Scott), NIDCD F31 DC020901 (PI: Prescott), and NICHD U54 HD090256 (Waisman Center core grant).