Communication with nonverbal adult autistic people

Adult autistic people without linguistic communication form a group that has hardly been studied, mainly due to the complexity of carrying out research in groups with these characteristics.

Now, a group from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), made up of the Ikerbasque professor Agustín Vicente and the researchers Natàlia Barbarossa & Elena Castroviejo, have studied the linguistic, conceptual and comprehension abilities of non-linguistic symbols in autistic adults who they have a minimal vocabulary (comparable to that of a typical 2½ year old). This is a study with a small number of participants, specifically eight, and lasted six months.

The study began with an analysis of the words that each participant understands to later see if they understand compounds of those words: For example, if they understand “car” and they understand “red”, do they understand “red car”? Only one of the participants was able to understand these noun plus adjective combinations, despite the fact that, in a vocabulary test carried out previously, the scores obtained showed a vocabulary equivalent to that of a child aged 1 year and two months, in the case lowest, and a child of 3 years and 10 months, in the highest case. The person who recognized as many words as a 3 year and 10 month old did not understand ‘red car’, things that typical children of 18 months and even younger understand.

Next, they set out to find out if this language difficulty was properly linguistic or could be due to an inability to combine concepts (for example, the concept of a car and the concept of red). To do this, they carried out two more tests: a concept composition test, which showed better results than the linguistic composition test, and the test that obtained the best results, which was to compose pictograms represented on a tablet through a system of alternative and augmentative communication: SAACs.

Once they learned to communicate with the tablets, the “car+red” composition study was repeated, but with pictograms (car pictogram + red pictogram). Most of the participants had no problem selecting the red car from among the various alternatives.

The study concludes that the vocabulary measurement tests of these people show a linguistic comprehension that is not what they really have. In many cases, they can recognize words in isolation, but not compounds of words, much less phrases. Understanding their real level of language comprehension is essential for family members and caregivers, since their ability to understand is often overestimated and they have the impression that they are understood when they are not.

From left to right, Elena Castroviejo, Agustín Vicente and Natàlia Barbarossa. (Photo: Nuria González / UPV/EHU)

On the other hand, the linguistic comprehension test that we designed is a very simple tool that allows us to quickly check whether an apparently non-verbal person is capable of understanding very simple expressions of the language and thus, get a more approximate idea of ​​what that they come to understand.

Another important aspect that the study shows is that linguistic difficulties can only be linguistic, not thought, as has been believed on many occasions.

Finally, it also highlights that the use of SAACs is efficient in this population, since pictograms, in addition to being more easily understandable than words, allow complex thoughts to be communicated that cannot be communicated with words. The study suggests that the adaptation of the SAACs for this population not only increases the amount of things that the person can refer to, but also increases the ability to express thoughts.

The study is entitled “Linguistic, concept and symbolic composition in adults with minimal receptive vocabulary”. And it has been published in the academic journal Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics. (Source: UPV/EHU)