Say that again: Quantifying patterns of production for children with autism using recurrence analysis

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Amanda Mankovich¹  Jessica Blume²  Kacie Wittke³  Ann M. Mastergeorge²  Alexandra Paxton⁴  Letitia R. Naigles¹ 

[1] Department of Psychological Sciences, UConn Child Language Lab, University of Connecticut;Human Development and Family Sciences, Research in Early Developmental Studies Lab, Texas Tech University;Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, University of Connecticut;Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Connecticut;Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action, University of Connecticut

关键词: autism;    grammar;    productivity;    language development;    Recurrence;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2022.999396

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

The current research study characterized syntactic productivity across a range of 5-year-old children with autism and explored the degree to which this productivity was associated with standardized measures of language and autism symptomatology. Natural language samples were transcribed from play-based interactions between a clinician and participants with an autism diagnosis. Speech samples were parsed for grammatical morphemes and were used to generate measures of MLU and total number of utterances. We applied categorical recurrence quantification analysis, a technique used to quantify patterns of repetition in behaviors, to the children’s noun-related and verb-related speech. Recurrence metrics captured the degree to which children repeated specific lexical/grammatical units (i.e., recurrence rate) and the degree to which children repeated combinations of lexical/grammatical units (i.e., percent determinism). Findings indicated that beyond capturing patterns shown in traditional linguistic analysis, recurrence can reveal differences in the speech productions of children with autism spectrum disorder at the lexical and grammatical levels. We also found that the degree of repeating noun-related units and grammatical units was related to MLU and ADOS Severity Score, while the degree of repeating unit combinations (e.g., saying “the big fluffy dog” or the determiner-adjective-adjective-noun construction multiple times) in general was only related to MLU.

【 授权许可】

CC BY