Investigating Vocabulary Profiles in Preverbal and Minimally Verbal Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

The majority of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are delayed in producing their first words and approximately 30% continue to be minimally verbal across childhood. The current study examined the syntactic and semantic features of the early words that 64 preverbal and minimally verbal children with ASD produced and compared them to 682 typically developing (TD) toddlers who produced 1-10 words. Word-level responses that were reported on the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory were examined. Children with ASD produced a greater proportion of predicates, relative to the TD group. Also, there were group differences in the following semantic categories: action words, people, sound effects, and animals. Of these, children with ASD produced more action words. We further examined the action words by assigning them social scores, with action words that typically involve people having higher social scores. TD toddlers produced action words that were slightly more social than children with ASD. These findings suggest that future studies should examine early verb learning and processing in children with ASD.