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The study examined some common features of mothers’ vocabularies in their speech to children with autistic. Detailed analyses were conducted on transcripts of spontaneous conversation between six autistic children and their mothers, who were followed over a period of between 12 and 26 months (Tager-Flusberg, Calkins, Nolin, Baumberger, Anderson & Chadwick-Dias, 1990; MacWhinney, 2000). Results first indicated the small core lexicon shared by all the mothers (9.5%) made up a total of 78% of the mothers’ actual speech. This is similar to the feature of core lexicon in the maternal speech to typically developing (TD) 2-year-old children (Hu, 1994). Results also showed that, in contrast to maternal speech to TD children, the core lexicon of the mothers of autistic children was composed of slightly more content words than function words (60% vs. 40%). Thus, mothers restrict their choice of lexical items to a small pool of highly frequent words when conversing with their children, whether autistic or TD. This information could aid in the creation of assessment measures of lexical input. |
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