{"id":446,"date":"2017-04-02T14:27:12","date_gmt":"2017-04-02T14:27:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/?p=446"},"modified":"2017-04-02T14:27:12","modified_gmt":"2017-04-02T14:27:12","slug":"disfluency-children-asd-sli","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/disfluency-children-asd-sli\/","title":{"rendered":"Disfluency in children with ASD and SLI"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our new article\u00a0<\/a>on disfluency in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) or specific language impairment (SLI) is now out in PLOS ONE. (The team consisted of Heather MacFarlane\u2014who also did most of the annotation and much of the writing\u2014myself, and\u00a0Rosemary Ingham, Alison Presmanes Hill, Katina Papadakis,\u00a0G\u00e9za Kiss, and Jan van Santen.)<\/p>\n

There is a long-standing\u00a0clinical impression that children with ASD are in some ways more disfluent than typically developing children, something likely related to their general difficulties with the set of\u00a0abilities known as\u00a0pragmatic language.\u00a0<\/em>We found that\u00a0the few prior attempts to quantify this impression were difficult to interpret, and in some cases, put forth contradictory findings. One limitation that we observed in the prior work (other than poor controls and small samples, which one more or less expects in this area) is the lack of a well-thought-out schema for talking about different kinds of disfluency. While specialists in disfluency have largely operated “under the hypothesis that different types of disfluency manifest from different types of processing breakdowns”, so it is valuable to have a taxonomy of the types of disfluency so as to know what to count. Thus one of our goals in the paper is to adapt\u2014to simplify, really\u2014the schema used by Elizabeth Shriberg (in her 1995 UC Berkeley dissertation) and show that semi-skilled transcribers\u00a0can achieve high rates of interannotator agreement using our schema. (We also show that much of the annotation can be automated, if one so chooses, and provide code for that.) Of course, we are even more\u00a0interested in what we can learn about pragmatic language in children with ASD from our efforts at quantifying disfluency.<\/p>\n

In in\u00a0sample of 110 children with ASD, SLI, or typical development, we find two\u00a0robust results. First, we found that children with ASD produced a higher ratio\u00a0of\u00a0content mazes<\/em> (repetitions, revisions, and false starts) to fillers\u00a0<\/em>(e.g.,\u00a0uh<\/em>,\u00a0um<\/em>)\u00a0compared to their typically developing peers. Secondly, we found that children with ASD produced lower ratios of\u00a0cued\u00a0<\/em>mazes\u2014<\/em>that is,\u00a0content mazes that contain a filler\u2014than their typically developing peers. We also found a suggestive result in a follow-up exploratory analysis: the use of cued mazes is positively correlated with chronological age in typically developing children (but not in children with ASD or SLI), which at least hints at a maturational account.<\/p>\n

If you have anything to add, please feel free to leave post-publication\u00a0comments at\u00a0the PLOS one website.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our new article\u00a0on disfluency in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) or specific language impairment (SLI) is now out in PLOS ONE. (The team consisted of Heather MacFarlane\u2014who also did most of the annotation and much of the writing\u2014myself, and\u00a0Rosemary Ingham, Alison Presmanes Hill, Katina Papadakis,\u00a0G\u00e9za Kiss, and Jan van Santen.) There is a long-standing\u00a0clinical … Continue reading “Disfluency in children with ASD and SLI”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"link","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-link","hentry","category-autism","category-language","category-speech","post_format-post-format-link"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=446"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":448,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446\/revisions\/448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}