Verbal and non verbal modalities contribute to building social interaction and the lexicon in at risk and atypically developing children

This symposium, assuming a neuroconstructivist approach to studying linguistic impairments (LI), aims to discuss how mother’s and child’s verbal and non verbal modalities contribute to building social interaction and the lexicon in at-risk (ARD) and atypically developing (AD) children,: i.e., at risk for LI because of an older sibling with autism (high risk; HR-ASD) or a preterm birth (PB), and delayed in language because of Down Syndrome (DS) or a specific LI (SLI). Different tools, both interactional and individual, such as observations and macro- and micro-analyses of parent-infant interaction and/or a lexical test and the parental questionnaire MacArthur-Bates CDI were used to investigate ARD and AD children’s communicative and linguistic abilities, as well as the dynamics of their interaction with a parent, compared to those of typically developing (TD) children. The papers contribute to an understanding of differences and similarities among ARD, AD, and TD children with respect to: a) relationships among gestures and words in child’s early language development and child’s verbal and gestural strategies in coping with lexicon (HR-ASD, PB, DS, SLI, TD); b) relationships between child’s and mother’s utterances (vocal and gestural) and mother’s communicative strategies supporting child’s linguistic abilities (HR-ASD, DS, SLI, TD). The comparison among the obtained results in ARD, AD, and TD children will allow to understand the dynamic complexity of early language development, underscoring how verbal and non verbal abilities contribute to building social interaction and the lexicon and highlighting how mother’s and child’s responses are reciprocally affected at the verbal and non verbal level and mother’s vocal and gestural strategies tune on child’s communicative and linguistic modalities. Methodological issues and clinical implications of these findings are discussed showing the relevance of employing interactional together with individual measures and of considering the integration of gestures and language in communication in order to depict the internal dynamics of contingent conversational responses in ARD, AD and TD children.