Abstract
For preverbal children, episodes of joint attention are contexts for communication with responsive adults. This study describes the joint attention of 3- to 5-year-old children, 15 with autistic disorder (AD) and 15 with developmental language disorder (DLD), during play sessions with unfamiliar adults. Adults used fewer conventional than literal bids for joint attention with AD children and vice versa with DLD children. Children with AD were less likely to engage in joint attention than children with DLD. In the allocation of attention, AD children monitored the channel of communication with the adult 37% less often than DLD children. We discuss how perturbations in reciprocal interactions permeate the sharing situation and the implications of this problem for the mastery of cultural conventions.
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The work reported here was supported by the National Institute of Neurologic Disorders and Stroke, U.S. Public Health Service (Program Project NS 20489, Isabelle Rapin, principal investigator) and by a grant from the Georgia State University Chancellor's Initiative Fund awarded to Lauren B. Adamson. The article is based in part on a master's thesis submitted to Georgia State University by the first author under the direction of Lauren Adamson. The authors acknowledge the contributions of committee members Roger Bakeman and Robin Morris and are grateful to Linda Eudy and Tricia Jones for their diligent coding of videotapes. An earlier version of this paper was presented as a poster at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, March 30–April 2, 1995, Indianapolis, Indiana.
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McArthur, D., Adamson, L.B. Joint attention in preverbal children: Autism and developmental language disorder. J Autism Dev Disord 26, 481–496 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02172271
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02172271