How Do Caregivers Support Interaction with Their Autistic Children Who Are Not Yet Talking?

We are interested in describing the specific ways that caregivers ‘design’ their talk so that their autistic children are able to be part of the interaction, without having to rely on spoken language. We are also interested in the kinds of things autistic children who have very little spoken language do to participate in interactions with their caregivers. This could be things like coordinating their play actions with their caregivers’ actions or talk, using the rhythm of their vocalizations to convey meaning, or using their bodies to participate in interactions.

We are analyzing a set of videos of caregivers and young autistic children playing together with toys, that was collected for previous research. Using conversation analysis, we will look for specific things in these videos, like how caregivers pose questions to their children, and what they do if their children don’t respond to their questions or requests for the child to do something.

We would like to be able to describe the mechanics of how interactions between caregivers and their young autistic children work, when children are not yet talking. Some of our initial analyses suggest that caregivers pose questions so that what the child is already doing can serve as an answer to their question, such as  in the following interaction (things that the child does are put in parentheses):

Child: (puts a block on the tower)

Caregiver: What are you working on? Are you building the blocks?

Child: (puts another block on the tower)

Caregiver: Oh you are building the blocks, nice work!

In this interaction, when the child continues their play of building the tower, the caregiver takes this as a ‘yes’ to their question. We can see that they are taking the child’s actions as a response to their question by the way they close the interaction- by confirming that the child is building the blocks and offering them praise. The caregivers question and confirmation serve as an ‘envelope’ to the child’s actions, and allow the child to be involved in an interaction sequence with minimal effort. These kinds of episodes could be part of how children learn about how interactions work.

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