Person-reference in autism spectrum disorder: Developmental trends and the role of linguistic input

Past research has provided mixed evidence of the nature and difficulty with personal pronouns of children with autism spectrum disorder. No study to date has examined the nature of person-reference in autism, more broadly, by looking at referential language both in terms of who is being referred to (self vs. other) and how (words with shifting reference: personal pronouns, vs. fixed reference: names and nouns). Furthermore, the role of linguistic input specifically in the domain of referential language in autism has not been investigated before. We collected natural language samples from parent-child interactions from children with autism (N = 38; 7 female) at three time points (age 2, 3, and 4 years) and administered a battery of standardized assessments to evaluate their language ability. The samples were transcribed and coded for person-referential language. Children with autism used increasingly more pronouns both when referring to themselves and to their parent, but pronoun reversals were extremely rare. Their person-reference use was associated with language ability only at age 2. Parental input was also characterized by an increase in pronoun use but only when referring to their child. Parents' and children's person-reference were not associated across time, but they were concurrently related at age 3. Autism Res 2020, 13: 959-969. © 2019 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: In this study, we found that as children with autism grew older, they used more and more personal pronouns to refer both to themselves and their parents. Furthermore, they very rarely reversed their pronouns (used I instead of you) with only 1 child out of 38 making a pronoun error. This lack of pronoun errors suggests that pronoun difficulty in autism might not occur for long periods of time throughout development and might not be as prevalent in autism as previously thought.