Do focused interests support word learning? A study with autistic and nonautistic children

Abstract

Although focused interests are often associated with a diagnosis of autism, they are common in nonautistic individuals as well. Previous studies have explored how these interests impact cognitive, social, and language development. While some research has suggested that strong interests can detract from learning (particularly for autistic children), newer research has indicated that they can be advantageous. In this pre-registered study, we asked whether focused interests support word learning in 44 autistic children and a vocabulary-matched sample of 44 nonautistic children (mean ages 58 and 34 months respectively). In a word-learning task administered over Zoom, children were exposed to an action labeled by a novel word. The action was either depicted by their focused interest or by a neutral image; stimuli were personalized for each child. At test, they were asked to identify the referent of the novel word, and their eye gaze was evaluated as a measure of learning. The preregistered analyses revealed an effect of focused interests, and post-hoc analyses clarified that autistic children learned the novel word in both the focused interest and neutral conditions, while nonautistic children only showed evidence of learning in the neutral condition. These results suggest that focused interests are not disruptive for vocabulary learning in autism, and thus they could be utilized in programming that supports early language learning in this population.

Keywords: autism; interests; language; verbs; word learning.

Figure 1.

Schematic depiction of stimuli on one trial.

Figure 2.

Mean proportion of looking to the target during the Test Phase for the autistic group. The x-axis depicts time from the beginning of the Response period shown in Figure 1, after children have heard the query (e.g., “Where is doking?”); a second iteration of the query (e.g., “Find doking”) began at the onset of this window. Looks to the distractor as well as looks elsewhere are included in the proportion. The analysis window is outlined with a dotted line.

Figure 3.

Mean proportion of looking to the target during the Test Phase for the nonautistic group. The x-axis depicts time from the beginning of the Response period shown in Figure 1, after children have heard the query (e.g., “Where is doking?”); a second iteration of the query (e.g., “Find doking”) began at the onset of this window. Looks to the distractor as well as looks elsewhere are included in the proportion. The analysis window is outlined with a dotted line.

Figure 4.

Mean proportion of looking to the target during the Baseline Phase for the autistic group. Only looks to the target and distractor are included in the proportion.

Figure 5.

Mean proportion of looking to the target during the Baseline Phase for the nonautistic group. Only looks to the target and distractor are included in the proportion.