Tuning of unscripted parent narratives directed to autistic and non-autistic children: An exploratory eye-tracking study

Most autistic children have language delays, which can result in challenges with comprehending narratives. We explored how unscripted narratives produced by parents might be tuned to support their child’s language comprehension, and how children visually follow along with their parents’ speech. Data from English-acquiring 18 autistic (48-78 months) and 18 language-matched non-autistic children (32-50 months) and one of their parents were analyzed (n = 36). We examined variables related to topic identification and maintenance, including how often parents mentioned the narrative’s topic, how they referred to it (e.g., “the pig” vs. “it”), and how much children looked at it. Results indicated many similarities between groups, but also some key differences: parents of autistic children produced shorter narratives and talked about the primary character proportionally more than parents of non-autistic children. In both groups, children looked at the primary character more than other characters, and the parent’s proportion of topic reference was positively associated with children’s proportion of looking at the primary character. Similar patterns arose with the full sample of autistic children, which includes children who had not been able to be matched on language (n = 32). These findings suggest that parent input to autistic children may be tuned to support challenges that autistic children might experience, such as slower language processing or distractibility by unrelated story elements, and, given this tuned input, autistic children were successful, at least in the sense of looking at the primary character, in following along with the narratives.