%0 Journal Article
%T Personal pronoun usage in maternal input to infants at high vs. low risk for autism spectrum disorder
%A Angela Xiaoxue He
%A Rhiannon Luyster
%A Sudha Arunachalam
%A Sung Ju Hong
%J First Language
%@ 1740-2344
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/0142723718782634
%X Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are prone to personal pronoun difficulties. This article investigates maternal input as a potential contributing factor, focusing on an early developmental stage before ASD diagnosis. Using Quigley and McNally¡¯s corpus of maternal speech to infants (3¨C19 months; N = 19) who are either at high or low risk for a diagnosis of ASD, the study asked whether mothers used fewer pronouns with high-risk infants. Indeed, high-risk infants heard fewer second-person pronouns relative to their names than low-risk infants. The study further investigated the contexts in which mothers used infants¡¯ names. The results indicated that mothers of high-risk infants often used the infants¡¯ names simply to get their attention by calling them. This finding suggests that high-risk infants may thus hear relatively fewer pronouns because their mothers spend more time trying to get their attention. This may be related to differences in social-communicative behavior between low-risk and high-risk infants
%K Autism spectrum disorder
%K infants at-risk for autism
%K language development
%K parental input
%K pronoun
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0142723718782634