The authors looked at all studies of joint attention and language in children with autism since 1994.
They then selected all those that reported a clear measure of structural language using metrics such as vocabulary size, and excluded those that measured only communication skills. In neurotypical individuals, social interaction plays an essential role in language development."It makes sense to assume, therefore, that the ability to establish a shared attentional frame may increase the opportunities for autistic children to attend to linguistic stimuli and engage in communicative experiences," the authors of the study write.
However, their meta-analysis did not find significant language gains from interventions aimed at promoting social communication in people with autism. "Linking language outcomes to joint attention in autism is somewhat paradoxical, as the significant proportion of autistic children who become verbal still have a diagnosis of autism, a core component of which is, precisely, atypically low joint attention," they observe. For example, children with Asperger's develop impressive language skills without developing comparable social skills.