Autism and joint attention: Young children's responses to maternal bids

Problems with joint attention are an early manifestation of autism. Young b oys with and without autism were observed communicating with their mothers in contexts that afforded commenting, requesting, and interacting. Mothers of autistic sons made as many attention-regulating bids as mothers of typic ally developing sons, and these bids did not differ significantly in durati on. However, fewer occurred in commenting contexts, and they were less like ly to rely on purely conventional means. Their sons accepted fewer bids, an d they more often appeared unaware of a bid. These findings are discussed u sing a transactional view of communicative problems in autism in which a ch ild's difficulty regulating shared attention prompts adults to augment conv entional communication with literal, object-focused acts. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.