Speech and Gesture Production Provide Unique Insights Into Young Children's Spatial Reasoning

Spatial Language and Cognition in Autistic Preschoolers

PURPOSE

ASD is associated with relative strengths in the visuospatial domain but varying abilities in the linguistic domain. Previous studies suggest parallels between spatial language and spatial cognition in older autistic individuals, but no research to date has examined this relationship in young autistic children. Therefore, the purpose of the present study was to investigate the connection between children's spatial language production and nonverbal spatial cognition over time. We also examined two potential predictors of spatial language observed in previous literature, ASD symptom severity and parent spatial language input.

METHODS

In past work investigating spatial language in NT children of the same age, parent-child interactions have been a primary context for study. Therefore, in the present study, we analyzed transcripts of dyadic naturalistic play interactions between autistic children and their parents over three visits from age 30 to 66 months and administered standardized cognitive and ASD diagnostic assessments at each visit.

RESULTS

Spatial language production was related to nonverbal spatial cognition even when accounting for overall language production, though the strength of that relationship decreased over time. Parent spatial input (but not ASD severity) significantly predicted children's spatial language production over and above the effect of overall language production.

CONCLUSION

Spatial language is associated with spatial cognition in young autistic children and appears to reflect the interaction of overall linguistic skills and nonverbal spatial cognitive ability regardless of autism severity. Parent-mediated interventions may be a promising context for increasing spatial language in autistic preschoolers.

Examining the role of external language support and children's own language use in spatial development

This research investigated whether an experimental manipulation providing children with external language support reflects developmental processes whereby children come to use language within spatial tasks. A total of 121 3- to 6-year-old children participated in language production and spatial recall tasks. The Production task measured children's task-relevant descriptions of spatial relations on the testing array. The Recall task assessed children's delayed search for hidden object locations on the testing array relative to one or more spatial reference frames (egocentric, room-centered, and intrinsic). During the Recall task, the experimenter provided children with either descriptive or nondescriptive verbal cues. Results showed that children's task-relevant language production improved with age and the effects of language support on spatial performance decreased with age. However, children's production of task-relevant language did not account for effects of language support. Instead, children benefited from language support irrespective of their task-relevant language production. These results suggest that verbal encoding is not a spontaneous process that young children use in support of their spatial performance. In addition, experimental manipulations of language support are not fully reflective of the ways in which children come to use language within spatial tasks.

Spatial Thinking in Term and Preterm-Born Preschoolers: Relations to Parent-Child Speech and Gesture

Spatial skills predict important life outcomes, such as mathematical achievement or entrance into Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Children significantly vary in their spatial performance even before they enter formal schooling. One correlate of children's spatial performance is the spatial language they produce and hear from others, such as their parents. Because the emphasis has been on spatial language, less is known about the role of hand gestures in children's spatial development. Some children are more likely to fall behind in their spatial skills than others. Children born premature (gestational age <37 weeks) constitute such a risk group. Here, we compared performance of term and preterm-born children on two non-verbal spatial tasks-mental transformation and block design. We also examined relations of children's performance on these tasks to parental spatial language and gesture input and their own production of spatial language and gesture during an independent puzzle play interaction. We found that while term and preterm-born children (n = 40) as a group did not differ in the mental transformation or block design performance, children varied widely in their performance within each group. The variability in mental transformation scores was predicted by both a subset of spatial words (what aspects of spatial information) and all spatial gestures children produced. Children's spatial language and gesture were in turn related to their parents' spatial language and gesture. Parental spatial language and gesture had an indirect relation on children's mental transformation, but not block design, scores via children's spatial language, and gesture use. Overall, results highlight the unique contributions of speech and gesture in communicating spatial information and predicting children's spatial performance.

Unraveling the contribution of left-right language on spatial perspective taking

We examine whether acquiring left/right language affects children's ability to take a non-egocentric left-right perspective. In Experiment 1, we tested 10-13 year-old Tseltal (Mayan) and Spanish-speaking children from the same community on a task that required they retrieve a coin they previously seen hidden in one of four boxes to the left/right/front/back of a toy sheep after the entire array was rotated out of view. Their performance on the left/right boxes correlated positively with their comprehension and use of left-right language. In Experiment 2, we found that training Tseltal-speaking children to apply left-right lexical labels to represent the location of the coin improved performance, but improvement was more robust among a second group of children trained to use gestures instead.