Abstract
We examined the communicative intentions behind parents’ deictic gesture use with high-risk infants later diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 17), high-risk infants who were not diagnosed with ASD (n = 25), and low-risk infants (n = 28) at 12 months and assessed the extent to which the parental deictic gesture intentions predicted infants’ later vocabulary development. We found that parents in the three groups produced similar numbers of declarative and imperative gestures during a 10-minute parent–child interaction in the lab at 12 months and that 12-month parental declarative gesture use was significantly, positively associated with children’s 36-month vocabulary scores. Encouraging parental use of declarative gestures with infants could have important implications for language development.
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Acknowledgments
There has been no change in the author affiliation subsequent to the time of the study. This work was supported by the grants from the National Institutes of Health (R01-DC010290 to HTF and CAN; R21-DC08637 to HTF), Autism Speaks (1323 to HTF), and Simons Foundation (137186 to CAN). We would like to thank all the families for their participation in the study. We would also like to thank the former and current ISP team members involved in this research.
Funding
This study was funded by the grants from the National Institutes of Health (R01-DC010290 to HTF and CAN; R21-DC08637 to HTF), Autism Speaks (1323 to HTF), and Simons Foundation (137186 to CAN). The funding bodies did not have any role in the design, collection, analyses, and interpretation of data or in writing the manuscript.
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BC was involved in study conception and coding, analyzed and interpreted the data, and drafted the manuscript. LC and RM contributed to data coding and reliability and provided intellectual contributions throughout the project. MLR critically revised the manuscript for intellectual content. CAN and HTF were the co-principal investigators of the Infant Sibling Project and critically revised the manuscript for intellectual content. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Choi, B., Castelbaum, L., McKechnie, R. et al. Brief Report: Parents’ Declarative Use of Deictic Gestures Predict Vocabulary Development in Infants at High and Low Risk for Autism Spectrum Disorder. J Autism Dev Disord 52, 914–922 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-021-04989-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-021-04989-8