Autism | Speech and Language Sciences @ Newcastle University

Here is the abstract from Lucy Dempster’s final year research project, supervised by Dr Faye Smith and Professor Helen McConachie.

Comparing Interactions of Children with Autism with their Parents and Learning Support Assistants

Children with autism have difficulties initiating interactions and generalising skills across contexts. Therefore, providing intervention in both home and school contexts may be beneficial. The aim of this study was to compare the baseline level of adult synchrony and child initiations to see if there were any differences between parents and LSAs. Participants were 77 children with autism with a parent and LSA from the PACT-G trial who were filmed interacting separately with each adult. Adult communication acts were coded according to synchrony and child communication acts were coded as initiations or responses. A synchronous communication act follows the child’s attention, and a child initiation starts an interaction. No significant differences were found between the proportion of parents’ and LSAs’ synchronous responses or between the proportion of child initiations with parents and LSAs. There was no correlation at baseline between adult synchrony and child initiations. The results of this study indicate that when interacting with a child with autism, parents and LSAs have very similar interaction styles and the children interacted similarly with both adults. This indicates that both adults could benefit from intervention to increase synchrony as this has been associated with increased child initiations.

Key words: Language Intervention for Children, autism

Here is the abstract from Emily Erceylan’s final year research project, supervised by Dr Carol Moxam.

Are children with autism included in mainstream provisions? Perspectives from neurotypical 7-11 year olds in the North East of England.

Neurotypical peer-exclusion of children with autism in mainstream provisions is a current issue, which has detrimental consequences for those with autism (APPGA, 2017). This study reports 77 neurotypical children’s perspectives towards inclusion of children with autism, in the North East of England. Participants completed a questionnaire in relation to a hypothetical child (character) from a vignette, with four variations of characters: 1) neurotypical male; 2) neurotypical female; 3) male with autism; 4) female with autism. Participants were randomly assigned to one of the four conditions.

Data from the questionnaire measured participant perspectives towards inclusion of the character. Three variables were investigated on participant responses: 1) Character autism status; 2) Character gender; 3) Participant gender. 5-point Likert scales obtained quantitative data which measured perspectives towards inclusion; analysed statistically. Comment boxes obtained qualitative data and provided insight into quantitative findings; analysed with deductive Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006).

Findings confirmed that characters with autism were perceived to be less included by participants than neurotypical characters, to a highly statistically significant level. The influence of character or participant gender were not statistically significant. Although, qualitative data found that female characters received more positive comments, and, found that female participants provided slightly more positive ratings than male participants.

Overall, findings confirm claims from APPGA (2017); neurotypical children hold negative perspectives towards inclusion of children with autism. Thus, findings suggest that mainstream schools, concerned about peer-inclusion of children with autism, should attempt to change perspectives of neurotypical pupils, through teaching autism awareness (NAS, 2019e).

Key words: Autism, neurotypical, mainstream primary education, inclusion, perspectives.