When do Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder Take Common Ground into Account During Communication?
Autistic kindergarteners can track who knows what, but you must coach them to fold that knowledge into clearer spoken hints.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Malkin et al. (2018) watched 5- to young learners with and without autism play a hiding-finding game.
Each child saw a toy hidden with one adult, then later asked another adult—who had not seen the hiding—for help.
The team scored whether the child changed how they talked to the unknowing helper.
What they found
Kids with autism could remember which adult shared the hiding moment, but they used fewer helpful details when speaking.
Typical peers quickly said things like “it’s in the red box under the book,” while autistic children gave shorter, vaguer clues.
The gap shows they keep track of shared experience yet need help turning that knowledge into useful words.
How this fits with other research
Peters et al. (2018) explain why drills alone fail: isolated perspective games don’t carry over to real talk. Instead, teach perspective inside the social skill you want—exactly the missing step Louise found.
Hou et al. (2023) looked at younger children and saw the same pattern: kids with ASD could follow joint-attention cues with their eyes but could not explain the shared goal out loud. Together the studies trace a line from looking to speaking.
Mount et al. (2011) seems to disagree—autistic kids spotted social changes in pictures as well as typical kids. The twist: noticing social cues and using them to adjust your words are two separate jobs. Pictures only ask for looking; the hiding game asks for talking.
Why it matters
You now know high-functioning autistic learners may understand shared history yet still talk like strangers. Build short “memory reminders” into social scripts: have the child state what the partner saw (“Mr. Lee didn’t watch me hide it”) before giving directions. Practice this live, not in worksheets, and you’ll close the gap Louise found between knowing and saying.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
One feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a deficit in verbal reference production, that is, providing an appropriate amount of verbal information for the listener to refer to things, people, and events. However, very few studies have manipulated whether individuals with ASD can take a speaker's perspective to interpret verbal reference. A critical limitation of all interpretation studies is that comprehension of another's verbal reference required the participant to represent only the other's visual perspective. Yet, many everyday interpretations of verbal reference require knowledge of social perspective (i.e., a consideration of which experiences one has shared with which interlocutor). We investigated whether 22 5;0-7;11-year-old children with ASD and 22 well-matched typically developing (TD) children used social perspective to comprehend (Study 1) and produce (Study 2) verbal reference. Social perspective-taking was manipulated by having children collaboratively complete activities with one of two interlocutors such that for a given activity, one interlocutor was Knowledgeable and one was Naïve. Study 1 found no between-group differences for the interpretation of ambiguous references based on social perspective. In Study 2, when producing referring terms, the ASD group made modifications based on listener needs, but this effect was significantly stronger in the TD group. Overall, the findings suggest that high-functioning children with ASD know with which interlocutor they have previously shared a given experience and can take this information into account to steer verbal reference. Nonetheless, they show clear performance limitations in this regard relative to well-matched controls. Autism Res 2018, 11: 1366-1375. © 2018 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: No one had studied if young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) could take into account previous collaboration with particular conversation partners to drive how well they communicate with others. In both their language understanding and spoken language, we found that five to 7-year-olds with ASD were able to consider what they had previously shared with the conversation partner. However, they were impaired when compared to typically developing children in the degree to which they tailored their spoken language for a specific listener.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2018 · doi:10.1002/aur.2007