Difficulty with social communication is the most pervasive difficulty experienced by individuals with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (HF-ASD). Communication difficulties are often magnified in adolescence as social demands become more intricate. This puts adolescents with HF-ASD at increased risk of social isolation and depression, as they have difficulty developing positive social identity. Yet, there is a dearth of literature addressing the communication issues of this population and even fewer studies including the voice of adolescents with HF-ASD themselves. This study aimed to: 1) Explore the perspectives of adolescents with HF-ASD as to their social communication skills, 2) Explore what (if any) difficulties they perceive themselves as having when talking with their peers, 3) Explore if they would like help with social communication skills and 4) Determine what kind of help they think may be useful to them and establish if they already use self-initiated strategies. This study was qualitative in nature, using thematic analysis to analyse data collected from 10 semi-structured interviews with 5 adolescents with HF-ASD. Three themes emerged revealing the participants' perceptions of their difficulties communicating, challenging feelings that they experience about communication, and their perspectives about the support for developing communication skills. The 2 participants indicated a need for support to aid their desire to improve communication skills and interactions with typically developing peers. In educational settings, adolescents with HF-ASD may benefit from a peer mentor system to give them opportunities to practice social communication skills with typically developing peers and to encourage inclusion amongst their classmates.
Currently there are no standardized language assessments for English-Irish bilingual school age children that would test languages in a comparable way. There are also no standardized language assessments of Irish for this age group. The current study aimed to design comparable language assessments in both languages targeting structures known to be challenging for children with language impairments. A sentence repetition (SRep) task equivalent to the English SRep task (Marinis, Chiat, Armon-Lotem, Piper, & Roy, 2011) was designed for Irish. Twenty-four typically developing, sequential bilingual children immersed in Irish in the educational setting performed better on the English SRep task than on the Irish SRep task. Different patterns were observed in language performance across sentence types with performance on relative clauses being particularly poor in Irish. Similarly, differences were observed in error patterns with the highest number of errors of omission in Irish, and the highest number of substitution errors in English.
BackgroundOnline assessment of narrative production and comprehension became an important component of language assessment during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aimed to establish quantitative measures of narrative macrostructure in the production and comprehension of adult Irish-English bilinguals in an online assessment.MethodsA total of 30 Irish-English bilingual adults participated in an online assessment of oral narrative production and comprehension. Narratives were elicited using LITMUS-MAIN for Irish and English. Story-tell elicitation method was used for all stories. Twenty participants produced Baby Birds and Baby Goats story pairs while 10 participants produced Cat and Dog story pairs. Quantitative measures of story structure, comprehension score, and the overall number of Internal State Terms (ISTs) in production and comprehension were compared across the story pairs, languages, and the output type (production vs. comprehension).ResultsA general linear model indicated no differences in either story structure or story comprehension scores across languages for both sets of stories. Combined analysis for all participants and stories indicated no difference in the story structure scores or comprehension scores across the languages or the story pairs. While the overall number of ISTs was the same across languages, a higher number of ISTs was observed in comprehension relative to production in both languages for Cat and Dog story pair only, but not for Baby birds and Baby goats' stories. The major benefit of using online assessment was the accessibility of participants. The major drawback was the inability to control the environment and the quality of the internet connection.Conclusion and implicationsWhile online assessment increased the availability of participants, which is a significant factor in rural Ireland characterized by low population density and the high percentage of Irish speakers, the availability of stable internet connection limited the applicability of online assessment. Measures of narrative macrostructure were stable across the languages and the story pairs. This is important because of high variability in exposure to Irish, frequent code-switching, and a high number of morphosyntactic errors due to rapid language change that characterizes Irish-English bilinguals. Identifying reliable measures of language performance for Irish-English adult speakers is an important step toward establishing developmental norms for Irish-English bilinguals.
Irish is a rapidly changing minority language spoken as the main community language in some areas of the officially Irish-speaking Gaeltacht regions in Ireland. We analyse narratives from 17 parent–child dyads, living in one such area. All children, aged 3–6;4, had high exposure to the local variety of Irish. The input quality was measured by specifying consistency and accuracy of use of morphosyntactic forms in parental narratives directed to their children. The same morphosyntactic forms were analysed in narrative retell by the children. The children produced with high accuracy those forms that the parents used consistently and accurately. For the forms where parents’ usage was inconsistent, large variation in the children's usage was observed. The findings suggest that consistency and accuracy in the use of morphosyntactic forms in the parental language is an important factor in language acquisition; however, its influence might be confounded by other factors.
Irish (Gaeilge) is the first official language of the Republic of Ireland. It is a fast-changing, endangered language. Almost universal bilingualism (i.e. almost all Irish speakers also speak English), frequent code-switching to English, and loan words are features of the sociolinguistic context in which the language is spoken. This paper describes the adaptation of the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings - Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN, Gagarina et al., 2019) to Irish. Data was collected using the retell mode (Cat story) and the comprehension questions. Eighteen children participated ranging in age from 5;3 to 8;7 (six female and 12 male). Results suggest that story structure is not sensitive to exposure to Irish at home and indicate that MAIN Gaeilge (Irish) is a promising tool for assessing language in Irish- speaking children from a range of Irish language backgrounds.
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