Parental speech to typical and atypical populations: a study on linguistic partial repetition

Abstract Parents often use partial self-repetitions with variation in successive utterances (e.g., Want to get your ball? Get Do you want ball?). Such ‘variation sets’ contain latent distributional information about the building blocks of language and are predictive children's lexical grammatical structures. Because these properties parents atypically developing children virtually unknown, we compared for first time sets parental speech directed toddlers Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD), Down Syndrome (DS), a baseline group Typically Developing (TD). In Study 1, analyzed transcripts mothers' child-directed during naturalistic dyadic play interactions. While mean developmental age was same across three groups, found that measures repetitions were larger ASD than DS typical groups. 2 also mainly driven by mother, as opposed father. decrease chronological child atypical older TD group, our findings suggest compensating modes communication populations, especially group. The study validates extension structural/statistical analyses compare populations.