Jean Quigley School of PsychologyTrinity College Dublin

Mother’s Infant Directed Speech (IDS) in face-to-face interaction with typically developing infants and infant siblings (SIBS-A) of children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder, aged 3 to 12 months.

Funded by IRCHSS  

Project

Mother-Infant Interaction

Eye-contact; Contingent Reactivity; Maternal Infant Directed Speech (IDS) ‘motherese’

Critically important for infant development

4 main functions:

◦ communication of affect; ◦ facilitation of social interaction through infant preference; ◦ engaging and maintaining infant attention; ◦ facilitation of language acquisition.

Critical importance of speech addressed to infants during the preverbal period is well established.

The properties of that input are known to have important & specific effects on language development.

Mother’s vocal/verbal input & imitation rates are predictive of later language development in both typically & atypically developing children.

Yet little is known about the input received in this early pre-verbal stage before 12 months.

Mother’s style of interaction (e.g., informative or

affective) shapes infant responsiveness◦ strengthens either phonetic or prosodic qualities

of infant’s vocalisations ◦ impacts on frequency, complexity & intensity of

infant vocalisations

Equally, mothers’ style of interaction may have developed in response to infants’ particular characteristics

Maternal language in interaction

In the context of mother-infant interaction, throughout 1st year, many critical precursors of socio-communication & language development develop ◦ joint attention, pointing, looking behaviours,...

Behaviours often missing or impaired in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)

Autistic infants can experience some deficits in their linguistic environment

Parents report a lack/low rates of social initiatives and responsive behaviours from autistic infant, particularly toward the end of the first year

This affords parents less opportunities for responsiveness, tend to increase their solicitation behaviours

Pre-linguistic period in ASD

  Prospective Video Analysis design:

18 mother-infant dyads (10 normally developing infants, 9 infant siblings of children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder ASD) filmed every 4 weeks between the ages of 3 and 12 months during in-home face-to-face interaction.

One TD infant and 4 HR infants subsequently diagnosed with ASD.

Brief description

ASD is a highly heritable neurodevelopmental condition

Familial recurrence risk of 18.7% reported Evidence of early difference in at-risk

infants as well as in autistic children Possible that a pattern of ‘disrupted’

interaction present between infant siblings of children with autism and their mothers.

Babysibs worldwide consortiums

Why infant siblings?

Not that much known about the mothers of at-risk infants and the extent to which her behaviour is influenced by: ◦ Interactions with the infants’ older autistic sibling(s); ◦ Risk-status: expectations/anxieties about the infant; ◦ The infant’s own patterns of initiating, attending and

responding behaviour.

These infant siblings, at risk of developing a behaviourally-defined disorder characterised by socio-communicative impairments difficult to reliably diagnose before 18 months, present particular challenges for parents in interaction.

All speech & vocalisations transcribed (mothers >15,000 utterances) & analysed

Used Observer XT software to analyze and code mother-infant interaction◦ facial expression◦ all vocalisations ◦ eye gaze/looking behaviour◦ joint attention behaviours◦ …

for each dyad over the course of the first year.

Microanalysis

 

To compare maternal speech characteristics in face-to-face interaction with infants at high and low-risk for autism and to investigate if risk status affects the composition and complexity of maternal speech.

To investigate the development of a set of behaviours and responses identified as critical to language acquisition (BSID-III, ESCS, Still-Face procedure).

 

Aims and Objectives

What is known:

Mothers of children with ASD (compared to mothers of TD/DD children):

lower rates of sensitive responding refer more to themselves name their children more often use more directives pose less questions use more high-intensity approach behaviours more prompts, both verbal and non-verbal, to get the child’s attention

Mother’s conversational style - not the cause of the infant’s difficulties but parental behaviour has been shown to predict development of autistic children’s communicative development & is an important factor to consider.

DEVELOPMENTAL CASCADE

Functional analysis of IDS

Little consensus on associated outcomes, in particular in the case of ASD.

e.g., frequent redirection and solicitation rather than following of the infant’s focus of attention has been shown to hinder language acquisition in TD children and to demand a shifting of attention that is difficult for ASD children

but in early months, infants have also been shown to benefit from directive structuring of their play

Kasari (2012) pointing and gestures that direct the child’s attention had long-term beneficial effects on language development in autistic preschoolers

Johnson (2010) reported that maternal persistence in relation to engaging the autistic infant’s attention seemed to promote joint attention development

Outcomes?

More attention solicitations More questions but clarification type (like

fathers?) Less contingently responsive Less names & labels Less affirmatives & criticism/negatives

Result of a less active, responsive infant?

Results of pragmatic/functional analysis

Density: mean WPM & utterance rate Non-meaningful speech & vocalisations,10-13%

of all maternal input. Verb tokens as proportion of total words, 17-20%. Noun tokens as proportion of total words, 21%. Interrogatives 7-31%, not sig. between groups. Modifiers very restricted at 3%. 50% of all clauses in present or progressive tense

for both groups; only 5% past tense. Copula is main verb in 15-20% of all utterances.

Grammatical Analysis:Similarities between groups

MLU sig. lower for high-risk group, p<.05. Total word types sig. lower for high-risk group,

p<.01. VOCD sig. lower for high-risk group, p<.05. Different verb types sig. lower for high-risk,

p<.001. Different noun types sig. lower for high-risk group,

p<.05. Zero clause utterances sig. higher for high-risk

group, up to 80% of total input, p<.001. Use of infant’s name in isolation sig. higher for

high-risk group, p<.05.

Differences between groups

Mothers selectively respond to and imitate infant vocalisations Infants make use of this contingent social feedback to shape their

babbling.

At both 12 & 18 months, HR infants produced proportionately more, developmentally less complex, vocalisations than the LR controls.

HR mothers in turn were differently responsive to the speech-like quality of the vocalisations produced by their infant when compared with LR mothers at 18 months.

HR mothers also imitated their infants’ vocalisations more frequently than the LR mothers.

HR mothers may be implementing strategies of particular benefit as evidenced in some aspects of the infants’ language and cognitive outcome measures.

Maternal response patterns to infant vocalisations

Difficult to reliably and robustly identify behavioural markers at either individual or group level for autism before 12 or even 18 months.

Parental report is crucial. May also be productive to try to locate markers in the adaptive responsive behaviour of the adults who interact with these infants continually.

By analysing those intuitive, non-conscious aspects of parenting that are nonetheless critical for development we may be able, together with the red flag behaviours identified in the infants themselves, to use maternal behaviours in interaction to help identify dyads at-risk in a bid to intervene as early as possible.

Ask concerned parents about their style of interaction with their infant, specifically with regard to a hyper-stimulating style, which is proposed is a response to an under-active infant.

It may well be that the mother who feels something is wrong is basing this intuition on her own behaviour with the infant, rather than on any specific behaviour manifested by the child, or in response to a lack or depressed rate of certain expected behaviours and initiatives.

Conclusions

2nd aim: to analyse relationship between maternal IDS functional style and infants’ cognitive, language and socio-communicative development with a view to assessing the predictive validity of maternal speech functions for infant outcomes.

Few associations: increased incidence of attention-solicitations addressed to the high-risk infants is not in fact having a detrimental effect on developmental outcomes as it appears to have for the LR infants and may therefore have a place in intervention and training programmes.

Reinforces need for fine-grained contextual analyses before concluding that any particular style of interaction or IDS is inherently negative or beneficial in its effects

Only LR mothers’ responsive speech was positively associated with overall language scores aged 12 months, particularly with receptive language, and with initiating joint attention at 12 months.

However we interpret this association as a further reflection that the LR infants are more active and engaged and so are provoking more responsive speech from the mother rather than the mother’s speech producing better outcomes for the infant.

Delays in infant gesture and speech could alter the input infants receive leading to potential cascading effects on language development.

It is not the mothers’ usage of particular speech acts that facilitates language but rather language development is facilitated only when the child is actively engaged during the utterance.

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