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Joint Engagement and the Emergence of Language in Children with Autism and Down Syndrome

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Abstract

Systematic longitudinal observations were made as typically developing toddlers and young children with autism and with Down syndrome interacted with their caregivers in order to document how joint engagement developed over a year-long period and how variations in joint engagement experiences predicted language outcome. Children with autism displayed a persistent deficit in coordinated joint attention; children with Down syndrome were significantly less able to infuse symbols into joint engagement. For all groups, variations in amount of symbol-infused supported joint engagement, a state in which the child attended to a shared object and to language but not actively to the partner, contributed to differences in expressive and receptive language outcome, over and above initial language capacity.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R01HD35612) and from the Research Enhancement Program of Georgia State University. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development or the National Institutes of Health. Portions of the study were presented at the Society for Research in Child Development, Atlanta, 2005, and at the International Conference on Infant Studies, Kyoto, 2006. The authors thank Barbara Dunbar, Pamela K. Rutherford, Janis Sayre, and Kimberly M. McMillan for their many contributions to this project and Diana Robins for her helpful comments. In addition we gratefully acknowledge Alicia Brady, M. Janelle Cambron, Jesse Centrella, Susan Kupferberg, Ginair McKerrow, P. Brooke Nelson, Lauren Pierre, Jana Pruett, Rodney Teague, Melissa Traver, Anjali Vasudeva, and Leslie Wade who coded the corpus.

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  1. Deborah F. Deckner

    Present address: Clayton State University, Morrow, GA, USA

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  1. Department of Psychology, Georgia State University, Box 5010, Atlanta, GA, 30302-5010, USA

    Lauren B. Adamson, Roger Bakeman & Deborah F. Deckner

  2. Department of Communication, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA

    MaryAnn Romski

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Adamson, L.B., Bakeman, R., Deckner, D.F. et al. Joint Engagement and the Emergence of Language in Children with Autism and Down Syndrome. J Autism Dev Disord 39, 84–96 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-008-0601-7

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