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Recent work has reported differences in early vocabulary composition between young autistic and non-autistic children. This work has indicated that, although autistic children are learning from their environment, they may be processing their input differently and may be biased to learn different words. The current study examined whether young autistic children and non-autistic toddlers are biased to learn different words. The current study analyzed the expressive vocabularies of 200 autistic children (Mage=48.14 months) and 2,647 non-autistic children (Mage=20.73 months), matched on expressive vocabulary size. First, binomial analyses were used to indicate the likelihood of word production in the autistic group based on the probability in the non-autistic group within a certain vocabulary bin. We found 301 words that differed in production between groups. Next, effect size was computed for each word by looking at the probability of production across vocabulary size. Of the 301 words, 129 had a large effect size (>1 logit difference). These findings further quantify word-level learning differences between autistic and non-autistic children.
Funding source: LA Board of Regents RCS LEQSF(2020-23)-RD-A-05 |
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