Potential communicative acts in children with autism spectrum disorders.

Objective: To describe potential communicative acts in a sample of 17 children with autism spectrum disorders who produced few to no intelligible words (mean age = 32.82 months).

Methods: Parents reported on children's potential communicative acts for 10 different communicative functions. A potential communicative act was defined as any behavior produced by an individual that may be interpreted by others to serve a communicative purpose.

Results: Significant associations were found between higher number of gesture types and increased scores on language comprehension, language expression, and non-verbal thinking measures. Relative to other types of potential communicative acts, parents reported that children used higher proportions of body movement.

Conclusion: Number of body movement types was not related to child ability, while number of gesture types was related to receptive and expressive language. Findings underscore the link between language and gesture, and offer support for an ecological systems perspective of language learning.