Visual perceptual salience and novel referent selection in children with and without autism spectrum disorder.
Background & Aims: Many young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate striking delays in early vocabulary development. Experimental studies that teach the meanings of novel nonwords can determine the effects of linguistic and attentional factors. One factor that may affect novel ref...
| Published in: | Autism & Developmental Language Impairments Vol. 7; pp. 1 - 15 |
|---|---|
| Main Authors: | , , |
| Format: | pictorial research tables/charts Journal Article |
| Published: |
Sage Publications Inc.
3/18/2022
|
| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ccm&AN=155817282&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ccm uiTerm: 155817282 longDbName: CINAHL Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: dissinfo: jinfo: jid: 23969415 LBNC jtl: Autism & Developmental Language Impairments issn: 23969415 maglogo: Y pubinfo: dt: 3/18/2022 vid: 7 pid: 344 pub: Sage Publications Inc. place: Thousand Oaks, California artinfo: ui: 155817282 155817282 155817282 10.1177/23969415221085476 155817282 ppf: 1 ppct: 14 formats: tig: atl: Visual perceptual salience and novel referent selection in children with and without autism spectrum disorder. aug: au: Venker, Courtney E. Neumann, Dominik Aladé, Fashina affil: Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders, College of Communication Arts and Sciences, 3078 Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA sug: subj: Visual Perception In Infancy and Childhood Autism Spectrum Disorder Physiopathology Language Development Eye Movements Task Performance and Analysis Human Scales Funding Source Michigan Questionnaires Child, Preschool Child Comparative Studies Attention Descriptive Statistics Child, Preschool: 2-5 years Child: 6-12 years ab: Background & Aims: Many young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate striking delays in early vocabulary development. Experimental studies that teach the meanings of novel nonwords can determine the effects of linguistic and attentional factors. One factor that may affect novel referent selection in children with ASD is visual perceptual salience—how interesting (i.e., striking) stimuli are on the basis of their visual properties. The goal of the current study was to determine how the perceptual salience of objects affected novel referent selection in children with ASD and children who are typically developing (TD) of similar ages (mean age 3–4 years). Methods: Using a screen-based experimental paradigm, children were taught the names of four unfamiliar objects: two high-salience objects and two low-salience objects. Their comprehension of the novel words was assessed in low-difficulty and high-difficulty trials. Gaze location was determined from video by trained research assistants. Results: Contrary to initial predictions, findings indicated that high perceptual salience disrupted novel referent selection in the children with ASD but facilitated attention to the target object in age-matched TD peers. The children with ASD showed no significant evidence of successful novel referent selection in the high-difficulty trials. Exploratory reaction time analyses suggested that the children with autism showed "stickier" attention—had more difficulty disengaging (i.e., looking away)—from high-salience distracter images than low-salience distracter images, even though the two images were balanced in salience for any given test trial. Conclusions and Clinical Implications: These findings add to growing evidence that high perceptual salience has the potential to disrupt novel referent selection in children with ASD. These results underscore the complexity of novel referent selection and highlight the importance of taking the immediate testing context into account. In particular, it is important to acknowledge that screen-based assessments and screen-based learning activities used with children with ASD are not immune to the effects of lower level visual features, such as perceptual salience. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: pictorial research tables/charts Journal Article ougenre: Article language: English refInfo: holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
|---|