new corpus on autism

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Info-CHILDES,
  I am happy to announce the inclusion in CHILDES of a new corpus on the
language of young children with autism.  The corpus is from Pamela Rollins of
UTDallas.  It is rollins.sit in the /clinical directory.  There are four
files from each of five boys ages 2-3.  Here is part of the readme file.

--Brian MacWhinney

This corpus consists of transcripts of video recordings of 5 boys with autism
who attended a preschool program for children on the autistic spectrum at the
University of Texas at Dallas.  To be included this corpus, a child had to
meet the following criteria: (a) have an initial diagnosis of autism by a
psychologist or a neurologist; (b) have been preverbal at the time of intake;
(c) have attended the preschool program for at least one year; and (d) have
some conventional expressive vocabulary skills upon completion of the
program. The preschool program routinely videotapes each participating child
for the entire morning session several times during the school year.  For
each child, four videotapes were selected for later transcription and
analysis (the first, last, and two intermediate tapes).  The transcripts for
each child are numbered 1-4 or 5 corresponding to the tape number.  The
header file indicates the date of the video recording as well as the child¹s
age.
To capture each child's optimal level of on-task communicative functioning,
only intervals where the child was interacting one-on-one with his clinician
were transcribed and coded for analyses.  Therefore, activities such as small
group, music, and snack time were, by definition, excluded from the analyses.
This criterion was used because the language skills of children on the
autistic spectrum are influenced by both the setting and the participants.
Furthermore, efforts to capture the child's optimal level of on-task
communicative behaviors were made by excluding from the total number of
usable minutes the following intervals: (a) when the clinician or child was
out of the room, (b) when another child or teacher talked with the target
child and clinician, (c) when the clinician attempted to engage the target
child in an activity but where the target child refused to cooperate for
longer than 30 seconds, (d) when the target child actively avoided an
activity or interactions with the clinician for longer than 30 seconds, (e)
when the clinician and target child negotiated the next activity for longer
than 60 seconds.  This substantially reduced the total number of usable
minutes available for Transcription.  Videotapes were viewed and catalogued.
The catalogue included a time record for each activity so that the total
number of usable minutes for coding could be calculated. Activity header
lines were used to mark each new activity on the transcript. Twenty minutes
was the maximum number of usable minutes that was available for all children
in the study at each time point.  To ensure that the sample of 20 minutes was
representative for each child the videotaped interactions were reviewed by
persons familiar with each child.
Because the corpus was originally collected to describe pragmatic skills in
children with autism from the prelinguistic to early one word stage a good
deal of nonverbal information is transcribed.  The transcripts include %spa
codes using the Ninio, Snow, Pan, & Rollins INCA system described in the CHAT
manual.  In order to be coded as communicative, each communicative act had to
supported by behavioral evidence that the child had a plan/intention to
achieve a goal with awareness that another person can be a means to that end.
This behavioral evidence has been outlined by Prizant and Wetherby (1988) and
includes the following: (a) alternating eye gaze between a goal and the
listener, (b) persistent signaling until the goal has been met, (c) changing
the quality of the signal until the goal has been met, (d) ritualizing or
conventionalizing the form of signal within specific communicative contexts,
(e) awaiting a response from the listener, (f) terminating the signal when
the goal is met, (g) displaying satisfaction when the goal is attained or
dissatisfaction when it is not.  Communicative means is indicated on the
third level of the speech act tier.

Pamela Rosenthal Rollins
University of Texas at Dallas
Callier Center for Communication Disorders
1966 Inwood Road
Dallas, TX 75214
214-905-3153
rollins at utdallas.edu