Deferred Imitation and Social Communication in Speaking and Nonspeaking Children With Autism

The present study compares deferred imitation and early social communication skills among speaking and non-speaking children with autism and children with typical development. Overall, the children with autism showed a lower frequency on measures of both deferred imitation and social communication compared to typically developing children. Deferred imitation was observed at a significantly lower level among both the speaking and non-speaking groups of children with autism. However, when comparing the speaking autism group with the typical group many differences in observed social communication disappeared. The study points to the importance of considering the child’s verbal ability in autism research and indicates that specific difficulties in deferred imitation and in initiation of social communication are present in this group of children. Deferred imitation and communication 3 Deferred Imitation and Social Communication in Speaking and Non-speaking Children with Autism Children with autism usually have severe impairments in social interaction and communicative ability. Communicative problems are evidenced in social attention and regulation problems, and about a quarter of the children with autism never develop spoken communicative language (Hus, Pickles, Cook, Risi, & Lord, 2007). Joint attention is one of the prerequisites for the development of language, which is typically delayed in children with autism (e.g. Carpenter, Pennington, & Rogers, 2002). Another early emerging ability, which has not yet been well investigated in children with autism, is deferred imitation, although this capacity is related to both language (Heimann et al., 2006; Rose, Feldman, & Jankowski, 2009) and cognitive competence (Strid, Tjus, Smith, Meltzoff, & Heimann, 2006) in typically developing children. In the present, partly exploratory study, the main focus was to investigate deferred imitation and social communication in children with autism and children with typical development. The second aim was to investigate how these abilities differ between speaking and non-speaking children with autism.