Does Autistic Children’s Engagement with Caregivers Help Them Learn Language, or Does Language Help Them Engage with Caregivers?

Joint engagement, which happens when caregivers and their children play with toys together, is a developmental milestone thought to help autistic children learn language. However, research that has already been conducted on this has had limitations, because it has used correlational methods that cannot definitively determine the direction of influence. That is, whether joint engagement helps children develop language, or if developing language helps children jointly engage with caregivers. We conducted this study to figure out which of these two pathways is strongest, which can help therapists know which developmental milestones to support first (e.g., should they support joint engagement first, or language first?).

We collected videos of caregivers interacting with their autistic children, and coded the videos to figure out how often children played with toys with their caregivers in a reciprocal way (joint engagement), and how often caregivers spoke about what the child was doing while the caregivers and children were engaging together. We also asked caregivers to complete a vocabulary checklist to measure their children’s expressive vocabulary (words they say) and receptive vocabulary (words they understand). These measures were each collected twice, eight months apart. All of the children in the study spoke only a few words, and were between three and four years old. Next, we used a statistical test called a cross-lagged panel analysis to see which developmental pathway was strongest.

Our results suggest that joint engagement helps autistic children learn language, and not the other way around. Joint engagement that is accompanied by caregivers talking about the child’s activities appears helpful for receptive language.

We now have some insight about the developmental pathway of children’s language learning. The statistical results from our study were not completely definitive, but do suggest that it may be helpful for therapists to support the child’s joint engagement first, and that doing so could help children eventually learn language as a result. 

This project was supported by the National Institute for Deafness and other Communication Disorders under Grant Nos. R03DC017013-1 (PI Kristen Bottema-Beutel) and R01DC006893 (PI Paul J Yoder).

Bottema-Beutel, K., & Kim, S.Y. (2021). A systematic literature review of autism research on caregiver talk. Autism Research, 14(3), 432-449.

Bottema-Beutel, K., Kim, S.Y., Crowley, S., Augustine, A., Keceli-K.aysili, B., Feldman, J., & Woynaroski, T. (2019). The stability of joint engagement states in infant siblings of children with ASD: Implications for measurement practices. Autism Research, 12(3), 495-504.

Bottema-Beutel, K., Woynaroski, T., Louick, R.*, Keefe, E.S.*, Watson, L.R., & Yoder, P.J. (2019). Longitudinal associations across vocabulary modalities in children with autism and typical development. Autism, 23(2), 424-435.

Bottema-Beutel, K., Lloyd, B., Watson, L., & Yoder, P.J. (2018). Bidirectional influences of caregiver utterances and supported joint engagement in children with and without autism spectrum disorder. Autism Research, 11, 755 – 765.

Bottema-Beutel, K., Malloy, C., Lloyd, B., Louick, R., Nelson, L.J., Watson, L. R., & Yoder, P.J. (2018). Sequential associations between caregiver talk and child play in autism spectrum disorder and typical development. Child Development, 89(3), e157-e166. 

Bottema-Beutel, K., Yoder, P., Hochman, J.M., & Watson, L. (2014). The role of supported joint engagement and parent utterances in language and social communication development in children with autism spectrum disorder. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 44, 2162-2174.

This project was supported by the National Institute for Deafness and other Communication Disorders under Grant Nos. R03DC017013-1 (PI Kristen Bottema-Beutel) and R01DC006893 (PI Paul J Yoder).