Pronouns in maternal input to infants at high- vs. low-risk for autism spectrum disorder

Personal pronouns often cause difficulty for children with autism spectrum disorder. This may be due to pragmatic or perspective-taking difficulties, but the input may also be a contributing factor; adults may avoid using pronouns with children with ASD because they know that these words are difficult (Jordan, 1989). We examined the input directed to infant siblings of children with ASD (high-risk) vs. infants with a sibling without ASD (low-risk), using Quigley and McNally’s (2013) corpus of mother-infant interactions. We speculated that mothers of high-risk infants would avoid referring to the infant with a pronoun relative to mothers of low-risk infants, either because her experiences with her older child affect her interaction style with the infant, and/or because (some) high-risk infants present in a way that affects her linguistic choices. Indeed, high-risk infants were referred to by name rather than a pronoun 28% of the time, while low-risk infants were referred to by name only 12% of the time, indicating that risk status affects the frequency with which infants are exposed to second-person pronouns.