Community bulletin: Conversation analysis, relationship between autism and intellectual disability | Spectrum

Hello and welcome to the community newsletter! I am your host, Chelsey B. Coombs, Spectrumengagement editor.

Our first Twitter thread this week comes from Kristen Bottema-Beutel, associate professor at Boston College in Massachusetts. His new study in Autism looked at understand interactions between autistic children and their guardians using ‘conversation analysis’.

Our article on interactions between children with autism and their caregivers is out! With/ @ShanCLaPoint & @soyoonkimkang. We used a qualitative method, Conversation Analysis (CA), to reanalyze a type of caregiver discourse that we analyzed quantitatively 1/12 https://t.co/Thcoij4SDN

– Kristen Bottema-Beutel (@KristenBott) September 25, 2021

How caregivers talk to children with autism is important to children’s development, and many studies of how children learn language use follow-up guidelines, or a caregiver’s speech that relates to what is doing a child at that time. But interventions that prompt caregivers to commit to follow-up guidelines do not have lasting positive effects. Bottema-Beutel and colleagues argue that conversation analysis, “a tradition of qualitative and micro-analytical research that focuses on how social interactions are organized and interpreted by the people who participate in them”, could be more effective.

KT requires examining long periods of interaction to determine how social conduct is made relevant and how it shapes interaction in the future. This contrasts with quantum methods, where speech is divided into discrete units. Using CA, we found “tracking guidelines” 3/12

– Kristen Bottema-Beutel (@KristenBott) September 25, 2021

The researchers applied conversation analysis to videos of caregivers and autistic children playing. When a caregiver issues a directive, such as “Now try,” it gives the child the opportunity to interact and respond more easily than if they hadn’t. noted the team.

“We argue that analyzing proposals in this way provides nuance to previous research on caregiver use of follow-up guidelines, in a way that may have implications for helping parents interact with their autistic children. are in the early stages of learning the language, “the researchers write.

We hope that this type of work can shed light on how caregivers and their children with autism work together to create interactions, and how children with autism demonstrate their interactional abilities. 12/12

– Kristen Bottema-Beutel (@KristenBott) September 25, 2021

Sue Fletcher Watson, professor of developmental psychology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, tweeted the praise.

it’s a cool method! https://t.co/ENe07ztO1q

– Sue Fletcher-Watson (@SueReviews) September 25, 2021

Linda watson, a professor of speech and hearing sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, tweeted that during her doctoral studies she had found similar evidence.

Different methods but similarities in interpretation. We presented the results at the BU’s first annual conference on language development. The 46 is in November. #bucld

– Dr Linda Watson (@lindaritcwatson) September 26, 2021

Also this week on Twitter, Jonathan Sebat, professor of psychiatry and cellular and molecular medicine at the University of California at San Diego, kicked off an ongoing debate: is there autism, with a spectrum of traits, or several autisms that can be classified by different phenotypes? Sebat questioned the existence of autism without intellectual disability, a “holy grail” some researchers seek, claiming that autism with and without intellectual disability exists on the same spectrum.

During the autism session this morning, I asked the question “If IQ correlates with fundamental characteristics of ASDs, what is this holy grail that some are looking for in ‘autism without intellectual disability’?” Couldn’t that just be the stern end of the same spectrum? 1 / n # WCPG2021

– Jonathan Sebat (@sebatlab) 12 October 2021

Sebat hypothesizes that polygenic risk scores for autism, intelligence quotients, and educational attainment are all related due to certain subsets of alleles that overlap for a highly regulated neurodevelopmental process.

Hypothesis: the intersection of PSasd and PSea is a subset of alleles that move the needle on a neurodevelopmental process (who knows… synaptogenesis, cortical thickness etc…) which is tightly regulated in neurodevelopment. 5 / n

– Jonathan Sebat (@sebatlab) 12 October 2021

Jacob Vorstman, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto in Canada, replied that autism “is not a necessary phenotype at the severe end of the IQ spectrum” because there are people who have disabilities. intellectual but who do not have autism.

One of the observations that we have to take into account is that we see individuals with ID, but without ASD. Thus, TSA is not a necessary phenotype at the severe end of the IQ spectrum. Vice versa – we see people with ASD and with high IQs.

– Jacob Vorstman (@Jacob_Vorstman) 12 October 2021

Sebat replied that genetics currently suggest that autism without intellectual disability may be on the low-support end of the spectrum rather than an entirely separate entity.

Yes, but people talk about “TSA without ID”… as if it were something fundamentally different. Is it? This is not what genetics seem to suggest at the moment. This could just be the softer end of the spectrum that would have a less rare variant and a PRS load at the same time.

– Jonathan Sebat (@sebatlab) 12 October 2021

Don’t forget to register for our October 28 webinar, featuring Zachary J. Williams, a medical student and doctoral candidate at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, who will discuss the measurement of alexithymia in people with autism and the importance of developing and validating measurements for specific populations.

That’s it for this week’s community newsletter! If you have any suggestions for interesting social posts you’ve seen in autism research, please feel free to email me at chelsey@spectrumnews.org. See you next week!