Children with autism and related conditions frequently face challenges in several areas of communication. A new doctoral thesis in linguistics from the University of Gothenburg finds that listening to varied speech sounds can help these children develop speech, gestures, and sensitivity to rhythm and melody.
Children diagnosed with autism spectrum conditions (ASC)—including autism, Asperger’s syndrome, atypical autism and childhood disintegrative disorder—often struggle with gestures and with the rhythm and melody of spoken language. Despite this, research focused specifically on these communication domains is limited.
One reason to study the acoustic structure of speech is that critical development occurs in early childhood, when infants learn to distinguish different speech sounds and syllables within continuous speech. For many children with ASC, this stage can be difficult. Sensory input can be overwhelming or hard to integrate: some children struggle to sort auditory and visual impressions, to attend to what they hear and see while also being aware of their own bodies, and certain sensory signals may feel unusually intense.
Because many children with ASC have a pronounced attention to detail, interventions that concentrate on practising sounds and syllables can harness that strength. Focusing on phonemic contrasts and syllable structure can create opportunities for interaction and support development in broader linguistic areas.
“We wanted to test whether an intervention tailored to common traits in children with ASC could support multiple linguistic skills—such as awareness of syllables and sentence structure, intonation, and gestures,” says Pia Nordgren, author of the thesis.
Nordgren conducted three case studies with two Swedish boys diagnosed with ASC. The intervention introduced minimal word pairs—words that differ by a single speech sound, for example p-b—gradually and systematically to increase the children’s awareness of phonemic contrasts and of words as symbolic units. The findings indicate a temporal relationship between phonological structure, the melodic contours of speech, and the timing of gestures. The study also highlights that auditory and visual perception can serve as important precursors to language development in children with ASC. When children were guided to listen and observe, they showed potential for developing interaction through both speech and gestures.
The theoretical basis for the thesis draws on current ideas about brain organization for speech perception and production. The hypothesis is that listening stimulates the neural circuits that recognize and produce speech, which can in turn promote sound production overall and enable more complex syllable structures and new word use. This neural stimulation may also influence speech melody, gesture use, and other aspects of the child’s emerging language.
“Interestingly, the children demonstrated improvements in the melody of their speech even though melodic development was not a direct target of the intervention. One child also increased his use of gestures, despite the fact that gestures were not explicitly trained,” Nordgren reports.
The results lend support to a mechanism in the brain—such as systems involving mirror neurons—that links perception and production of speech. The findings also underscore the close interaction between speech and gestures and suggest that hand movements may help children with ASC in their language and speech development.
Additional observations from the study indicate that children with ASC who have very delayed speech may still develop spoken language later than typically expected, in some cases beginning to produce speech around age five. This suggests the intervention could be beneficial in therapeutic contexts and may provide a foundation for further linguistic research with children on the autism spectrum.
Source: Pia Nordgren, University of Gothenburg
Image credit: Columbia University School of Nursing / CTRPhotos (image used for illustrative purposes).
Original research: Pia Nordgren’s thesis, titled “From sounds to speech and gestures: Case studies of linguistic interaction in children with ASC,” was completed at the University of Gothenburg and is available through the university’s publications.