Communicative competence in parents of children with autism and parents of children with specific language impairment.
Communication deficits run in families of children with autism and language disorders, even when parents sound fine during play.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Ruser et al. (2007) asked parents to complete a short rating scale about their own everyday communication skills.
The team compared three groups: parents of children with autism, parents of children with specific language impairment, and parents of children with Down syndrome.
They wanted to know if communication problems cluster in families of kids with autism or language disorders.
What they found
Parents of children with autism scored lowest on the communication scale.
Parents of children with specific language impairment also scored low.
About one in seven parents in these two groups showed severe communication deficits, far more than in the Down syndrome group.
How this fits with other research
Wolchik (1983) and Wolchik et al. (1982) saw no big language differences when they taped short parent-child play sessions.
The older studies looked at how parents talked during a single play task.
F et al. used a wider self-report scale, so they captured everyday slips that a short tape could miss.
Wuang et al. (2012) later showed that mothers of children with autism or Down syndrome use the same helpful speech when developmental age is matched.
Together the papers say: parents talk fine to their kids, yet some still feel clumsy in daily life.
Why it matters
If a parent says “I’m just not good with words,” believe them.
Low parent communicative confidence can shape how often they practice new skills with their child.
You can build in quick wins: model a two-turn chat, give a praise line to copy, and let them rehearse with you right in session.
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Join Free →Ask each parent to rate their own talk skills on a 1-5 scale; if they pick 1-2, add a five-minute parent practice block to every session.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
While the primary language deficit in autism has been thought to be pragmatic, and in specific language impairment (SLI) structural, recent research suggests phenomenological and possibly genetic overlap between the two syndromes. To compare communicative competence in parents of children with autism, SLI, and down syndrome (DS), we used a modified pragmatic rating scale (PRS-M). Videotapes of conversational interviews with 47 autism, 47 SLI, and 21 DS parents were scored blind to group membership. Autism and SLI parents had significantly lower communication abilities than DS parents. Fifteen percent of the autism and SLI parents showed severe deficits. Our results suggest that impaired communication is part of the broader autism phenotype and a broader SLI phenotype, especially among male family members.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2007 · doi:10.1007/s10803-006-0274-z