Language Across the Lifespan: Studying Language Outcomes for Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Background:

When a child is diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, their parents often want to know what the future holds across several different aspects. Will my child learn to talk? Will they be able to make friends? How will we communicate with them?

Individuals with the disorder grow up developing diverse language abilities. Some children may remain non-speaking (using few words or no words at all) but are able to communicate through gestures or electronic devices, while others may have an extensive vocabulary and a strong comprehension and use of grammar. This wide range of abilities is what makes predicting language skills in children with the disorder very difficult for practitioners and service providers. Therefore, researchers from Australia decided to analyze all studies that investigated language outcomes in autistic individuals of all ages. They expressed their hope that studying these language abilities across different life stages would be the key to making predictions more accurate in the future.

The Study:

The researchers analyzed a total of 54 studies. These studies included children and adults of all ages. Some of these studies examined studies that included early intervention programs, while other included studies were only observational studies.

What is meant by intervention studies: studies that include therapeutic programs received by the participants.

What is meant by observational studies: those studies that monitor and record children's language abilities without providing them with a therapeutic intervention program.

After that, the researchers determined the quality of these studies to decide whether to include them in their review, and analyzed the results.

What They Found:

Because we know that many autistic children have language disorders, it comes as no surprise that most of these studies found that children with autism spectrum disorder score lower in language than their typically developing peers. However, most of these studies found that autistic children under the age of 11 maintain steady language growth, sometimes at a faster rate than their peers. This means that in some studies, children with autism spectrum disorder were able to "catch up" or narrow the gap between themselves and their typically developing peers. There was also some evidence that language development slows down after the age of 11. Here we point to the need for more research involving adult cohorts before we can confirm this pattern. Finally, they found that more than half of the individuals who were minimally verbal at the beginning of the studies became verbal by the end.

Points to Consider:

- Not all studies included a report on the severity of autism; therefore, these findings represent the general picture and not necessarily a comprehensive one. Every autistic child/individual who participated in these studies achieved a different outcome based on their baseline level, characteristics, and needs.
- Although some non-speaking children did not become verbal by the end of some of these studies, this meta-analysis did not include any studies examining other forms of non-verbal communication. Many non-speaking children use pictures or devices to communicate, and we consider this to be language development as well!
- Because some autistic children were able to make progress in multiple language domains before the age of 11, this demonstrates children's sponge-like capacity: able to absorb language at an early age. Now... is the right time to prioritize developing your child's language skills, whether through speech therapy sessions or during play at home.

So, can we make accurate predictions now?

Unfortunately, more research is still needed before we can do so. Every individual with autism spectrum disorder has unique characteristics, and we still need to better understand how these characteristics affect their language development. We also need more studies on older individuals to be able to track any other language changes. This meta-analysis (considered among the highest levels of scientific research) is very important because it contains findings from non-systematic descriptive studies. We can be certain of the importance of working on developing a child's language while they are still young. There is no time to delay!

Translated by: Khadijah Al-Aslani, PhD student at Purdue University, United States of America

First Source (a team of speech-language pathologists and professors):https://ei.northwestern.edu/language-across-the-li...

Primary Source: Brignell, A., Morgan, A. T., Woolfenden, S., Klopper, F., May, T., Sarkozy, V., & Williams, K. (2018). A systematic review and meta-analysis of the prognosis of language outcomes for individuals with autism spectrum disorder. Autism & Developmental Language Impairments, 3. doi:10.1177/2396941518767610

Originally published in Arabic. This English version was produced with AI-assisted translation; the Arabic original remains the reference.