Examining Useful Spoken Language in a Minimally Verbal Child With Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Descriptive Clinical...

Area of Science:

• Developmental Psychology
• Clinical Psychology
• Speech-Language Pathology

Background:

• Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often presents with communication challenges, including limited verbal skills.
• Minimally verbal children with ASD require detailed profiling to understand their unique developmental trajectories.
• Previous research (Biller & Johnson, 2019) established a baseline for minimally verbal children with ASD.

Purpose of the Study:

• To create a detailed descriptive profile of a minimally verbal child with ASD and a unique medical history.
• To assess the social-cognitive and speech sound production abilities of this child.
• To explore the relationship between these abilities and his developing spoken language.

Main Methods:

• A descriptive, single-case clinical study of a 3-year-old boy with a chromosomal abnormality and ASD.
• Assessed four social-cognitive and three speech sound production abilities.
• Included a parent interview and two child assessment sessions.

Main Results:

• The child demonstrated low social-cognitive and speech sound production abilities relative to his age.
• Social-cognitive abilities were higher than speech sound production abilities.
• He exhibited significant differences in these domains compared to other minimally verbal children with ASD, correlating with a larger vocabulary.

Conclusions:

• Despite age-related deficits, the child's abilities may be sufficient to support upper-limit vocabulary for minimally verbal children.
• Quantitative and qualitative differences were noted between this child and peers in a previous study.
• A potential developmental threshold for social cognition and speech sound production may enable spoken language expansion.