Brief Report: Early Lexical Comprehension in Young Children with ASD: Comparing Eye-Gaze Methodology and Parent Report

Abstract

Lexical comprehension is commonly measured by parent report, but it may be difficult for parents of children with ASD to accurately judge their child's comprehension. We compared parent report to an eye-gaze measure of lexical comprehension in which participants observed pairs of images on a screen, along with accompanying speech that named one of the two images. Twenty-two toddlers with ASD participated. Trials were included if the target word was reported as unknown. Children spent significantly more time looking at the target after it was named than before (d = 0.66). These results provide evidence that eye-gaze measures can reveal emerging lexical knowledge in young children with ASD that may otherwise be overlooked.

Keywords: Assessment; Autism spectrum disorder; Lexical comprehension; Parent report; Receptive vocabulary.

Figure 1

Time course data averaged across trials and children. Shading indicates +/− one standard error of the mean. The y-axis is mean proportion of looks to target (looks to target/looks to target and distracter). The x-axis is time in ms, with 0 indicating the onset of the target noun. The horizontal grey line indicates y = .5, which represents equal looking to target and distracter. The grey vertical lines indicate the test window (300 ms to 2000 ms after noun onset).

Figure 2

Plot of proportion of looks to target (looks to target/looks to target and distracter) by window and condition. The solid center lines indicate the median. The red diamonds indicate the mean. The upper and lower hinges represent the 25^th and 75^th percentiles. The upper whiskers extend from the hinge to the highest value within 1.5*inter-quartile range (IQR), where IQR is the distance between the first and third quartiles. The lower whiskers extend from the hinge to the lowest value within 1.5*IQR of the hinge. The data points beyond the whiskers fall outside of this range and thus may be considered outliers. The baseline window was the 2000ms prior to noun onset. The test window was 300 ms to 2000 ms after noun onset. There was a main effect of window, with significantly greater mean proportion of looks to target in the test window, regardless of condition.