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Conversation Skills in Chinese-Speaking Preschoolers with Autism: The Contributing Role of Parents’ Verbal Responsiveness

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Abstract

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have conversation deficits, yet the growth of conversation abilities is understudied, especially in Chinese-speaking populations. Little is known about whether their parents’ verbal responsiveness and redirectives are related to their conversation skills. Children with ASD (N = 37; M = 5;5) and their parents contributed their language samples. These children interacted with their parents at four time points over nine months. The number of conversational turns and the proportion of child-initiated conversation (but not the proportion of children’s appropriate responses) grew over nine months. After controlling for time, autism severity, and language skills, parents’ verbal responsiveness positively predicted children’s appropriate responses. Parents’ redirectives negatively predicted the proportion of children’s appropriate responses and the number of conversational turns.

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Availability of Data and Materials

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Notes

  1. Eight children aged above 68 months old. Thus, MSEL might not accurately measure their expressive and receptive language abilities. However, note that these eight children, like most of the children participating in this study, were found to have delay in their receptive and expressive language abilities (receptive language age equivalent: M=58.12; SD=8.32; expressive language age equivalent: M=46.34; SD=6.48). Thus, their language abilities still fell within the language age equivalent range in MSEL.

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Acknowledgments

We acknowledge Mui-Fong Wong for administering ADOS-2 and the help of our research assistants Johnny Fung, Fai-Yeung Kwok, Shing-Hey Lee, Ying-Yi Lee, and Jonathan Tse with data collection and transcription. Special thanks to all of the children and their parents for their help and dedication to education.

Funding

This research has been fully supported by a grant from the Innovation and Technology Fund for Better Living (“FBL”; Project no. ITB/FBL/8005/17/P).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Educational Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Wing-Chee So, Xue-Ke Song, Chun-Ho Cheng, Wing-Wun Law, Tiffany Wong, Oi-Ki Leung & Ying Huang

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  1. Wing-Chee So
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  2. Xue-Ke Song
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  3. Chun-Ho Cheng
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Contributions

WCSO wrote the manuscript and designed the study. WCSO and XKS analyzed the data. WWL, TW, OKL, and YH collected and coded the data.

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Correspondence to Wing-Chee So.

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All of the procedures were approved by the Survey and Behavioral Research Ethics Committee of the first author’s university, in compliance with the Declaration of Helsinki (SBRE-19-307).

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We obtained parents’ informed consent prior to the study. The participants also gave their assent to participate in this study.

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So, WC., Song, XK., Cheng, CH. et al. Conversation Skills in Chinese-Speaking Preschoolers with Autism: The Contributing Role of Parents’ Verbal Responsiveness. J Autism Dev Disord 52, 1106–1119 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-021-05017-5

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