Personal pronoun usage in maternal input to infants at high vs. low risk for autism spectrum disorder

Abstract

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are prone to personal pronoun difficulties. This article investigates maternal input as a potential contributing factor, focusing on an early developmental stage before ASD diagnosis. Using Quigley and McNally’s corpus of maternal speech to infants (3–19 months; N = 19) who are either at high or low risk for a diagnosis of ASD, the study asked whether mothers used fewer pronouns with high-risk infants. Indeed, high-risk infants heard fewer second-person pronouns relative to their names than low-risk infants. The study further investigated the contexts in which mothers used infants’ names. The results indicated that mothers of high-risk infants often used the infants’ names simply to get their attention by calling them. This finding suggests that high-risk infants may thus hear relatively fewer pronouns because their mothers spend more time trying to get their attention. This may be related to differences in social-communicative behavior between low-risk and high-risk infants.