Development of social
communication
1
Objectives
Learn the developmental path for social communication
Learn skills
Know Know the pivotal (foundation) and the precursor skills
Learn Learn ways of facilitating development
2
The precursor and the foundation skills
Pivotal skills: imitation, social
engagement, social motivation
(Roger & Lewis, 1989)
Precursor skills for language and
mentalising e.g. joint attention
(Mundy et al 1990)
3
The importance of the learning environment
The importance of active participation by
the child for learning (Saffran, 1996)
The essential context of social relationship
for the development of communication
(Rogers and Pennington, 1991)
Learning is facilitated by the sharing of
affect (Dawson et al., 1990; Kesari et al,
1990)
4
5
The atypical developmental
Understanding
Typically developing cascade second order false
skill belief
Absent or late Understanding
Understanding false belief: ToM
developing skill
belief Implicit → Explicit
Functional play Symbolic/pretend
play
Recognising
Desire
Joint Recognise
attention intention
Attention, Recognise
Imitation Emotions
&
intersubje
ctivity
0– 6 6-12 12-18 18-36 36-60
months months months months months
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Social smile 6 weeks
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Imitation- the beginning of self and
other understanding “Like me”
Facial movements: from the first few weeks
Coordinated mouth movements and sounds: 4 months
Coordinated actions, e.g. with toys
Deferred imitation of others’ actions (18 m): domestic
mimicry indicates social awareness and attention
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=play
er_detailpage&v=LxZxBU31z0c
Early mother child interaction 2-3 months
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=play
er_detailpage&v=jqGW7SDdTNg#t=40
Early mother child interaction 2-3 months - vocalisations
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Stranger anxiety
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Stranger
anxiety
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9 months: initiates
with a smile
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Social referencing 9-12 months
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Social referencing – visual cliff experiment
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Range of smiles at 12 months: broad in response to
parents greetings, muted in response to strangers,
open mouthed in stimulating play
15
Shy smile
18
months
16
Shy 2 year
old
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Mirror self-
recognition
2 years
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Self-
conscious
three year
old
19
Attention: I can see where you are looking!
Detecting head and eye direction: about 6
months
1 2
Not necessarily locating the object of interest or sharing
interest.
20
Pointing to
ask 9
months
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Development of gestures
Typical Gesture Development deictic gestures (10 months) - drawing attention to
an object or event in the child’s immediate environment (e.g. showing, giving,
pointing) ritualized requests (9-13 months) – requesting by reaching with an
open and closed grasping motion, putting an adult’s hand on an object, or pulling
an adult’s hand towards a desired item play schemes (12 months) – actions
carried out on an object that demonstrate the object’s function (e.g. drinking out
of a toy cup) iconic gestures (develop before a child has acquired 25 words) –
illustrating an aspect of the item or action they represent (e.g. blowing to indicate
bubbles, flapping one’s arms to represent a bird). Some iconic gestures are
culturally defined, such as waving to greet. gesture + speech combinations (18
months) – children first produce complementary gestures, which contain
information that complements the spoken message (e.g. point to a dog and say
“dog”). Soon after, children produce supplementary gestures, which provide
additional information to the spoken message (e.g. pointing to a dog and saying
“big”). (Capone & McGregor, 2004; Goldin-Meadow, 2015)
22
Gestures in ASD
Compared to the other two groups, children with ASD:
- produced a lower total number of gestures
- used fewer “conventional-interactive gestures” –gestures that are culturally defined, such as
waving or nodding one’s head for “yes”
- produced significantly fewer pointing gestures and showing gestures
- used a significantly higher proportion of ritualized requests
- produced fewer “nominal/partner” gestures – nominal gestures are made with the object or
referent in hand, and provide a label for the object. Nominal/partner gestures involve the
ability to engage a partner in play, when the child performs an action on the partner’s body
(e.g. child brings a toy apple to her mother’s mouth to let her eat). The authors also examined
the children’s use of “nominal/onself” gestures (e.g. child drinks from a cup herself) and
“nominal/object” gestures (e.g. child brings a toy apple to a doll’s mouth to eat), and found no
differences between the three groups of children.
- produced “instrumental gestures” – these are contact gestures where the child directly
manipulates the partner’s hand/body and uses it as a tool (e.g. place mother’s hand on a
container the child wants to open). The authors found that the other two groups of children did
not produce instrumental gestures.
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Gestures and ASDS
While the verdict may still be out about intervening in this
area, what we can take away from this research is a
gestural profile that is specific to children with ASD.
Specifically, if we assess children who… produce few
gestures overall use contact (“instrumental”) gestures
and ritualized requests produce few conventional-
interactive gestures (e.g. waving, nodding head, etc),
nominal/partner gestures (e.g. feeding mom with a toy
cup), pointing or showing …we should suspect ASD. This
may be particularly helpful information when observing
nonverbal children who are difficult to assess.
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Sharing
attention –
pointing to
show 12 (10-
12) months
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Attention
• To faces
• To voices
• To patterns – face like
patterns
• To objects – midline
exploration of objects by
4 months
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Responding to JA
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Significance of JA
JA plays a pivotal role in word learning
(Baldwin, 1995) during the second year
of life and predicts language ability at 3
to 4 years (Adamson et al 2009)
it is correlated with orienting and
attention to distress (Wetherby et al.,
2007)
28
Social orienting deficit
Low motivation to look at social
stimuli (Dawson et al 2005)
limits the opportunities for early
social engagement (Prelock,
2006)
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YES! Several studies report
positive effects for training.
Can a • Engaging parents, teachers, and
child with others in naturalistic and play
activities
ASD be • Using activities of child’s choice,
trained in and motivational toys/activities
• Using behavioural supports such
JA? as prompting, contingent
reinforcement, modelling and
coaching
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Training in JA
Initiation of JA often follows the ability
to respond to JA . Initiation is
particularly difficult for children with
ASD
First, facilitate the child’s response to JA.
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Mental state and cognitive state
understanding
Mental • Perception (see, look) → Emotions
(happy, Sad) → desire (want, need)
state:
Cognitive • “think”, “know”, and “believe” → false
belief → higher order false belief
state
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Understanding
emotions
• smiling in response to a smiling
face 6 – 8 weeks
• Happy appears to be the first
emotional expression infants learn
to identify at about 5m.
• Negative emotional expressions in
the face are recognised at around
7 months.
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Laughing 3-4
months
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Angry at 6
months
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Understanding emotions
Second only to the emotion
happy, the emotion sad is
one of the most easily and
accurately identified
emotions.
In ASD, the recognition of
basic negative emotions
including sad is generally
found to be impaired.
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Desire: want/need
the understanding of the verb “want” is one of
the earliest developing mental state language
achievements (Lillard & Flavell, 1992; Wilson,
2013).
Children with ASD may actually exceed
neurotypical controls in their ability to produce
desire terms
37
around age 2 years (from 14 months to 3 years), children can
accurately predict emotional consequences when another’s desire and
the situational outcome are known (i.e., others are judged as ‘happy’ if
the outcome was wanted and ‘sad’ if it was not)
38
Understanding
emotions
• the recognition of surprise is later-emerging, not
until the preschool years or even later
• the understanding of disgust occurs very
gradually: by the age of 4, children know the
meaning of word ‘disgust’ as well as they know
the meaning of ‘anger’ and ‘fear’, i.e., they can
generate plausible causes for each of these
emotions.
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Understanding emotions
• The understanding of
embarrassment has been
shown to develop substantially
between the ages of 5 and 8
years
– related to advances in
social perspective-taking
– second-order perspective-
taking
– understanding of social
norms and the standards
used to evaluate emotional
experiences
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Understanding emotions
• Processing of social
emotions like guilt are
related to the capacity for
producing increasingly
elaborate representations
of people and social
relationships and “the
maturation of the social
brain network” that
occurs in adolescence and
beyond.
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• At nine months of age, infants can distinguish
purposeful from accidental actions
• By 12 months they understand that a person’s actions
Intention on a container or tool are directed at the goal it enables
the user to attain rather than the tool or container itself
(Woodward, 2009)
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Intention
The 10–12 months of age represents
an important transitional period in
infants’ action understanding. At 12
months, after watching a completed
action sequence of a cloth being
pulled to obtain a toy, infants
understood that the action was
directed toward the toy (and not the
cloth itself).
43
Intention
18-month-old infants infer the goal of uncompleted action
sequences, and infants as young as 14 months imitate intended
but not accidental acts (Gergely et al,2002).
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Play: exploration of
objects
• Exploration of objects –
touching, banging, mouthing
6m
• Targeted actions (cause-and-
effect) – pressing buttons,
pulling strings – to obtain
specific effects (9-10 months)
• Happy responsiveness to
exciting social interactions e.g.
peek-a-boo is well established
by 9 months.
45
Play: functional
use of objects
Use of common objects,
e.g., using a hair brush,
putting on hat, ‘talking’ on
phone (12m).
Plays pat-a-cake with carers
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Other directed play
Initial self –directed play .
becomes other directed
from 18-21 months, inviting
interaction from carers.
Using toys functionally on
the parent/carer (15-18
months) and on a doll (18-
21 months); initially using
simple toys e.g. cup, spoon
and later other objects e.g.
blanket, bottle
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Play: substitution
pretence
Begins to play with substitution
objects in commonly observed
activities e.g. can use something that
is not much like a cup to feed the doll
(24 m).
Plays alongside.
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Play: giving agency to toys
Gives agency to toys e.g.
makes a doll ‘say’
something or do
something (feed
another doll) (about 2 ½
years).
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Play: awareness of
pretence and role play
• Children know and say that they
are pretending e.g. “this towel is
my baby” (3 to 4 years).
• joins with other children, often
comments on other’s play. Sharing
materials but often pursuing own
ideas.
• From age 3 years children involve
others in ‘role play’.
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Play: using language to share imagination
• Uses language to
frame pretend play
e.g. “this is my
shop”
• Creation of
conventional and
fantasy scenarios.
• From 4-5 years
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Cognitive state understanding
– “appearance – reality” distinction,
– “Seeing- knowing”
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Appearance - reality distinction
Sponge or Bread? Apple or candle?
Three-year-olds have some ability to make the distinction in
specific and concrete task situations. It improves dramatically
at four years of age when children are able to consider
alternative representations of the same object.
53
What people see (and do not see) as
tests of what people know (and do not
know). In typical development 3- and 4-
year-olds understand perceptual access
as a source of knowledge
Seeing
leads to
knowing
54
Visual perspective taking
If two people
look at the same
object from a
different
standing point,
they will see the
object in
different ways.
Level 1: 2 years
Visual perspective taking
Level 2: 4-5 years
56
Understanding cognitive terms: “know”,
“think” and “believe”
The understanding of “know” and “think”
appears between 3 to 4 years of developmental
age and “believe” at around 4 years.
→ false belief → higher order false belief
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False belief understanding
Explicit mentalizing from 4-6 years
• Justifying false belief by pointing out misleading reasons
• Understanding higher order mental states
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59
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Q: “Where will Sally look for her marble?”
A: “Where she thinks it is!” 61
False belief understanding
Fast learning in normal development
Slow learning in autism
Autistics show 5 year delay 62
Second order belief understanding
An individual may hold a false belief thought about another’s desire,
thought or belief
The child understands that people have thoughts about:
- other peoples’ thoughts: “she thinks that I think she is a good
dancer”
- other peoples’ feelings: “she thinks that he is not very happy about
his work”
• Higher order reasoning develops 1-2 years after the first-order FB
(Miller, 2009) between 6- and 7-years of age (Tager-Flusberg &
Sullivan, 1999).
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Second order belief understanding
• Higher order reasoning develops 1-2 years after
the first-order FB (Miller, 2009) between 6- and
7-years of age (Tager-Flusberg & Sullivan, 1999).
• Strong links between second-order reasoning
and verbal memory, verbal reasoning, and the
ability to keep track of longer and more complex
discourse
64
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Not much emotions towards others ??Empathy
66
Showing overt emotions towards others 2-2 ½ years
? empathy
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Normal?
Yes!
68
Responding to other’s distress: 4
year +
69
Implicit and explicit mentalizing
• In normal development
• Implicit mentalizing by 18 months
• Explicit mentalising from 4-6 years
• In autism
• Early signs of implicit mentalizing failure
• Explicit mentalising from 12 years
70
Development of friendship
18 months Child shows awareness of another child’s
distress.
20 months Beginning to cooperate with a
sibling/peer in order to achieve a goal.
2 years Development of preferences for
particular companions.
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Development of friendship
3 years Uses references to friendship to include and
exclude, e.g., ‘I’m not your friend today’. T
Tendency to label any play companion as a
friend, therefore can appear fickle.
Development of ‘fighting friends’, i.e.,
reciprocal relationships that include both
harmonious play and conflict.
Some children develop imaginary friends.
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4 years Children are clear about who their
Development ofwill
friends are and friendship
differentiate
between friends and other peers.
5 years Increasing understanding of the
needs, feelings and wishes of
friends.
Able to talk about what makes
someone a friend
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Facilitating social developmental
If interactive scenarios like playing with a parent
and the rattle involved both social and non-
social skills we can create opportunities to
develop both in a enjoyable and motivating way.
Early, parent delivered, play based interventions
lead to increased attention to parents, with
longer-term positive effects on parental
directiveness and child communication.
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How to facilitate the development of
cognitive terms understanding
Rich and frequent conversations about desire, affect, perceptual)
mental state
Talk that is semantically contingent and/or follows the child’s
attentional focus
Use of a playful, activity-based interactional style with younger
children that incorporates nonverbal turns, affection, and short,
simple utterances and avoidance of frequent and repetitive
questioning
Use of explanatory talk about the causes and consequences of
mental states
Use of contrastive talk about emotions
The use of ‘thought bubbles’ during semi-structured conversation
to make inner mental states explicit
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