Children with ASD use joint attention and linguistic skill in pronoun development

Abstract

Producing pronouns involves linguistic and social-cognitive knowledge because children must learn words and understand pronouns’ changing referents. This study examined pronoun production longitudinally in young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 15), whose social-cognition might impair pronoun use, and in typically developing (TD; n = 18) children. Modeling the effect of joint attention (JA; a social-cognitive factor) and a name bias (NB; a linguistic factor) revealed a positive relation between NB and second- and third-person pronouns for all children and a positive relation between JA and those pronouns in just the ASD group. Social-cognitive and linguistic processes affected the ability of children with ASD to use pronouns; TD children’s pronouns were related to linguistic skill and unaffected by JA.