THE IMPACT OF ELECTRONIC TOYS ON THE QUALITY AND QUANTITY OF LINGUISTIC INPUT PROVIDED BY PARENTS OF CHILDREN WITH AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER
Although electronic toys have become increasingly prevalent over the past decade, recent studies show that these toys may decrease the linguistic quality of parent utterances in typically developing (TD) children. However, there is little evidence to support the impact these toys may have on parent-child interactions for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), who may also exhibit difficulty processing language in noise and may show delays in language development. To address this current gap in knowledge, the current study investigated parent-child interactions during two, 10-minute, play sessions with 14 children with ASD (2-4 years old) and their parents. One session utilized traditional toys, and the other utilized electronic toys (counterbalanced across participants). Overall, play with electronic toys resulted in lower linguistic quality of parental language input, including a significant difference in unique word roots per minute, pause time, number of words per minute, and auditory overlap. Parent grammatical complexity and number of total words did not significantly differ between toy types. This shows that traditional toys may be more beneficial to child language development and suggests that electronic toy play may elicit lower quality language input from parents of children with ASD.
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- In Collections
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Electronic Theses & Dissertations
- Copyright Status
- In Copyright
- Material Type
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Theses
- Authors
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Sturman, Mackenzie
- Thesis Advisors
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Venker, Courtney E
- Committee Members
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Vallotton, Claire
Phillips, Matthew
- Date
- 2021
- Subjects
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Speech therapy
- Program of Study
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Communicative Sciences and Disorders - Master of Arts
- Degree Level
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Masters
- Language
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English
- Pages
- 76 pages
- Permalink
- https://doi.org/doi:10.25335/rvty-t788