Understanding Interactions between Autistic Children and Their Caregivers
Understanding Interactions between Autistic Children and Their Caregivers
Research Questions
We are interested in describing the specific ways that caregivers ‘design’ their talk so that their autistic children are included as participants in the interaction, without having to rely on spoken language. We are also interested in the kinds of things autistic children who have very little spoken language do to participate in interactions with their caregivers. This could be things like coordinating their play actions with their caregivers’ actions or talk, using the rhythm of their vocalizations to convey meaning, or using their bodies to participate in interactions.
Approach
This project uses a qualitative approach, Conversation Analysis, to provide a detailed description of how interactions proceed. We are analyzing a set of videos of caregivers and young autistic children playing together with toys, that was collected for previous research. Using conversation analysis, we will look for specific things in these videos, like how caregivers pose questions to their children, and what they do if their children don’t respond to their questions or requests for the child to do something.
Goals
We would like to be able to describe the mechanics of how interactions between caregivers and their young autistic children work, when children are not yet talking. Some of our initial analyses suggest that caregivers pose questions so that what the child is already doing can serve as an answer to their question, such as in the following interaction (things that the child does are put in parentheses):
Child: (puts a block on the tower)
Caregiver: What are you working on? Are you building the blocks?
Child: (puts another block on the tower)
Caregiver: Oh you are building the blocks, nice work!
In this interaction, when the child continues their play of building the tower, the caregiver takes this as a ‘yes’ to their question. We can see that they are taking the child’s actions as a response to their question by the way they close the interaction- by confirming that the child is building the blocks and offering them praise. The caregivers question and confirmation serve as an ‘envelope’ to the child’s actions, and allow the child to be involved in an interaction sequence with minimal effort. These kinds of episodes could be part of how children learn about how interactions work.
Key Findings
We examined 15 dyads consisting of a caregiver and their 3-4 year old autistic children who were in the early phases of language development.
- We found that caregivers' play proposals were embedded in sequences that had a similar structure, and were prefaced with a ‘pre-proposal’; where the caregiver established the child’s interest in a joint activity and signaled the upcoming proposal.
- We also found that the caregiver’s talk was provided in such a way that there was a clear “slot” for the child’s turn, which made it easy for the child’s actions to become part of an interactional sequence.
- In addition, play proposal sequences were very negotiable—caregivers did not usually insist that the child follow through on the proposal, only that they produce an action that could be taken as a response.
- Finally, there were some instances where the child’s turn was very precisely timed to occur right at the end of a caregiver’s proposal; this precise timing could signal the child’s understanding of how interactional turn-taking works.