AUTISM: You Don't Say
Research looks at communication differences with kids with autism
BY:MYRA DEMBROW
A study presented in May 2007 at the International Meeting for Autism Research in Seattle suggests why young autistic children have a hard time learning to understand language. Researchers at the University of Washington looked at the difference in children's brain waves upon their hearing words that most toddlers know (dog, cat, ball and book) and words they don't (bide, pint, rate and verb).The children ranged in age from 19 to 30 months old. Those who were developing normally showed very different responses to the two sets of words. But the brain waves of the children with autism appeared the same, whether the words were familiar or not, not differentiating between familiar and unfamiliar words. That means the autistic subjects couldn't tell the difference between new words and ones they often had heard before, the researchers say. As a result, their brains may become overloaded.
"Because these children can't distinguish what should be a familiar word [from an unfamiliar word], their brains work too hard and they are unable to focus on new words," explains researcher Patricia Kuhl, PhD, co-director of the university's Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences. "When they can't understand a word, they miss everything else that follows in a sentence."