DeLTA Center Roundtable - Calum Hartley

Calum Hartley, Lecturer, Lancaster University, will present a DeLTA Center Roundtable on the abstract below:

"Exploring the impact of autism on mapping, retention, and generalisation of new words"
Abstract: The ability to learn words is central to children’s cognitive and social development. However, the acquisition and usage of spoken words can be impaired by autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Research to date has focused on how ASD impacts discrete word learning mechanisms, predominantly referent selection (the process of identifying a word’s intended meaning). Comparatively little attention has been paid to the influence of ASD on retention and generalisation of word-referent relationships, or how word-learning processes fit together as a system. I will present four new experiments that examine how school-aged children with ASD and neurotypical controls matched on receptive vocabulary identify (through fast mapping and cross-situational mapping), retain, and generalise the meanings of novel words. We also assess whether children’s learning can be enhanced by social and non-social attentional cues and feedback. Our findings reveal many between-population similarities, suggesting that core word learning mechanisms are unimpaired by ASD when expectations are based on children’s language comprehension. However, we also identify differences in the two populations’ use of social information in the service of word learning.