RESEARCH Open AccessVerbal labels increase the salience of novelobjects for preschoolers with typicaldevelopment and Williams syndrome, butnot in autismGiacomo Vivanti 1,2* , Darren R. Hocking 3 , Peter Fanning 2 and Cheryl Dissanayake 2AbstractBackground: Early research has documented that young children show an increased interest toward objects thatare verbally labeled by an adult, compared to objects that are presented without a label. It is unclear whether thesame phenomenon occurs in neurodevelopmental disorders affecting social development, such as autism spectrumdisorder (ASD) and Williams syndrome (WS).Methods: The present study used a novel eye-tracking paradigm to determine whether hearing a verbal labelincreases the salience of novel objects in 35 preschoolers with ASD, 18 preschoolers with WS, and 20 typicallydeveloping peers.Results: We found that typically developing children and those with WS, but not those with ASD, spent significantlymore time looking at objects that are verbally labeled by an adult, compared to objects that are presented withouta label.Conclusions: In children without ASD, information accompanied by the speaker’s verbal label is accorded a “specialstatus,” and it is more likely to be attended to. In contrast, children with ASD do not appear to attribute a specialsalience to labeled objects compared to non-labeled objects. This result is consistent with the notion that reducedresponsivity to pedagogical cues hinders social learning in young children with ASD.Keywords: Autism, Williams syndrome, Social learning, Referential communicationBackgroundHuman learning is a selective process [1–3]. From in-fancy onward, children are more likely to pay attentionto and acquire knowledge from stimuli that are accom-panied by another’s communicative (“pedagogical”) cues,such as eye contact and infant-directed speech and bodylanguage [4–6]. For example, typically developing pre-schoolers are more likely to focus on and imitate a novelaction if the model establishes mutual gaze before thedemonstration [7, 8] or acts in a socially engagingmanner [9, 10].Another cue that enhances children’s attention to spe-cific information in the environment is the presence of averbal label. Baldwin and colleagues [11, 12] were thefirst to demonstrate that infants spend significantly moretime looking at and manually exploring objects that areverbally labeled by an adult, compared to objects thatare presented without a label. Several theoretical per-spectives emphasize this as a critical process that facili-tates language acquisition (see [13–15]).The socially guided selection of relevant “to-be-learned”information reflects an early emerging sensitivity to thepedagogical structure underlying social learning. Thisprocess involves a knowledgeable adult guiding the child’sattention to relevant features in the environment throughvarious ostensive cues, and a child equipped with dedi-cated cognitive resources to notice, read, and take* Correspondence: giacomo.vivanti@drexel.edu1 A.J. Drexel Autism Institute, Drexel University, 3020 Market Street, Suite 560,Philadelphia, PA 19104-3734, USA2 Olga Tennison Autism Research Centre, School of Psychology and PublicHealth, La Trobe University, Melbourne, AustraliaFull list of author information is available at the end of the article© The Author(s). 2016 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, andreproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link tothe Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver(http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.Vivanti et al. Journal of Neurodevelopmental Disorders (2016) 8:46 DOI 10.1186/s11689-016-9180-7
