Gaze Following, Gaze Reading, and Word Learning in Children at Risk for Autism

Abstract

Journal ______________________________________________________________All articles available through Birkbeck ePrints are protected by intellectual property law, including copyright law. Any use made of the contents should comply with the relevant law. We investigated gaze following abilities as a prerequisite for word learning, in a population expected to manifest a wide range of individual variability -children with a family history of autism. Three-year-olds with or without a family history of autism took part in a word-learning task that required following gaze to find the correct referent of a novel word. Using an eye-tracker to monitor children's gaze behavior we show that the ability to follow an adult's gaze was necessary but not sufficient for successful word learning. Those children that had poor social and communicative skills could follow gaze to the correct object, but did not then learn the word associated with that object. These findings shed light on the conditions that lead to successful or less successful word learning in typical and atypical populations. ______________________________________________________________

Atypical Gaze Following in Autism: A Comparison of Three Potential Mechanisms

“…There was some evidence that learning may be more evident when assessed via the same modality as training; Gaze following during eye-tracking and cognitive level was only associated with looking toward the referent when it was labeled during the eye-tracking test phase and not in person referent selection. The current findings extend the Gliga et al (2012) claim that gaze following is “necessary but not sufficient for successful word learning” by demonstrating that the frequency of gaze following may be less related to word learning in response to gaze cues than cognitive level among children with ASC.…”

“…An eye-tracking study with 3-year-old siblings of children with autism suggests that understanding the referential intention behind gaze may be more important for word learning than gaze following (Gliga et al 2012). Despite the absence of clear differences in gaze following (either duration or frequency) toward the object a model was labeling, siblings with poorer social-communication skills looked less to the target object during testing than typically developing children.…”

Attention and word learning in autistic, language delayed and typically developing children

“…In support of this possibility, the tendency to follow a speaker’s gaze to a target referent has been shown to predict language ability among typically developing children (Carpenter et al, 1998; Morales et al, 2000; Brooks and Meltzoff, 2005, 2008; Mundy et al, 2007) and children with ASD (Bono et al, 2004; Dawson et al, 2004). Recent work indicates that gaze following among autistic children is necessary but not sufficient for successful language learning and that recognition of the communicative relevance of gaze shifts are related to the autistic child’s level of social impairment (Gliga et al, 2012). …”

Where the action is

“…An early concern with the issue of 'progress' in terms of repertoires of behaviours across the trials was replaced on further inspection of the data with an interest in the range of behaviours which appeared relevant to the issue of socio-emotional reciprocity but which might nonetheless be easily missed if the analysis were guided by a concern with identifying only pre-specified behaviours. This, consistent with much conversation analytic research with clinical populations (Schegloff 2003;Goodwin 2003) was pursued through analysis focusing on a single child. The child was involved in a total of 8 trials with KASPAR between March & November 2011.…”

“…Using a coding frame such as the Lord et al 's (2000) Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule-Generic (ADOS-G), would be quite likely to record this as a competent component behaviour, yet, again, abstracted from sequential context the sense of how it is used and the sorts of interactional attunement that is revealed by the "facial expression directed at an adult" would be missed. The facial expression of smiling can -as Haakana (2010) suggests -be seen as enabling the transition into shared laughter, especially when accompanied with the establishment of mutual gaze as in these data. Thus C's action of gazing and smiling can be seen as fitted to both the prior action -of his having pressed his preferred button on KASPAR's remote control -and as facilitating the shared laughter that follows (lines 11 and 12).…”