Expressivity in children with autism and Williams syndrome
ISSN: 2056-3868
Article publication date: 11 December 2020
Issue publication date: 11 December 2020
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to investigate the social and affective aspects of communication in school-age children with HFA and school-age children with WS using a micro-analytic approach. Social communication is important for success at home, school, work and in the community. Lacking the ability to effectively process and convey information can lead to deficits in social communication. Individuals with high functioning autism (HFA) and individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) often have significant impairments in social communication that impact their relationships with others. Currently, little is known about how school-age children use and integrate verbal and non-verbal behaviors in the context of a social interaction.
Design/methodology/approach
A micro-analytic coding scheme was devised to reveal which channels children use to convey information. Language, eye gaze behaviors and facial expressions of the child were coded during this dyadic social interaction. These behaviors were coded throughout the entire interview, as well as when the child was the speaker and when the child was the listener.
Findings
Language results continue to pose problems for the HFA and WS groups compared to their typically developing (TD) peers. For non-verbal communicative behaviors, a qualitative difference in the use of eye gaze was found between the HFA and WS groups. For facial expression, the WS and TD groups produced more facial expressions than the HFA group.
Research limitations/implications
No differences were observed in the HFA group when playing different roles in a conversation, suggesting they are not as sensitive to the social rules of a conversation as their peers. Insights from this study add knowledge toward understanding social-communicative development in school-age children.
Originality/value
In this study, two non-verbal behaviors will be assessed in multiple contexts: the entire biographical interview, when the child is the speaker and when the child is the listener. These social and expressive measures give an indication of how expressive school-age children are and provide information on their attention, affective state and communication skills when conversing with an adult. Insights from this study will add knowledge toward understanding social-communicative development in school-age children.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Judy Reilly PhD and Ursula Bellugi Ed.D for their guidance. The staff at PCND for helping with data collection, members of the Developmental Laboratory for Language & Cognition at San Diego State University (SDSU), and members of the Laboratory for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Salk Institute for their assistance. The author is particularly grateful to the children and their families for their participation in this investigation. This research was supported in part by National Institutes of Health Grants NINDS/NIMH P50 NS22343, as well as the Institute for Neural Computation Training Program for Cognitive Neuroscience at UCSD, the San Diego Fellowship from the Office of Graduate Studies at UCSD and SDSU NIH Training Grant-Neurocognitive Approaches to Communication Disorders T32DC7361. These funding sources had no role in study design or execution and were not involved in writing this article.
Citation
Lai, P.T. (2020), "Expressivity in children with autism and Williams syndrome", Advances in Autism, Vol. 6 No. 4, pp. 277-288. https://doi.org/10.1108/AIA-11-2019-0044
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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