© 2019 Think Social Publishing, Inc.
Social Communicative Development
Social development appears to begin prior to birth and emerges in the early days of life as babies actively pursue social learning through their daily experiences (Hirsh-Pasek &
© 2019 Think Social Publishing, Inc.
Social Communicative Development
Social development appears to begin prior to birth and emerges in the early days of life as babies actively pursue social learning through their daily experiences (Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 2003). Marshall and Fox (2006) describe early social developmental milestones, identifying that babies as young as 36 hours of life distinguish between facial expressions while babies at seven months match vocal expressions of emotion to facial expression. By the end of the first year of life, infants are also developing pre-linguistic communication skills such as declarative/imperative points (Carpenter, Pennington & Rogers, 2002). Toddlers are actively developing social learning, which includes responding to the ideas of others, even before they can verbally express these ideas (Meltzoff, 1995). For example, the more a child engages in verbal communicative exchanges, the more he or she learns about what other people are thinking.
This early social thought ignites the development of perspective taking which encourages abstract language to communicate increasingly complex feelings and thoughts (Flavell, 2004). By four years of age, neurotypical children emerge in their use of mental state verbs (e.g., think, know, guess, decide, etc.) to express information about what they think others are thinking (De Villiers, 2000). By six years old they can understand the basic concept that people can lie, cheat and steal (Baron-Cohen, 2000). As children begin to realize they can manipulate other people, their language emerges into increasingly sophisticated linguistic trickery. It is not uncommon to see a third grade child trick someone into looking in a certain direction and then state, “made you look.”
Social manipulation and the ability to think socially appear to be critical not only for social participation but also for understanding aspects of play, problem solving, understanding communicative intentions, written expression and reading comprehension (Booth, Hall, Robison & Kim, 1997; Norbury & Bishop, 2002; Westby, 1985). Not coincidentally, abstract social language and communicative interpretation become heavily coded in academic curricula, as students are asked early in their educational journey to interpret the intentions of a character in a story to understand the motives for the actor’s actions. Children with typical development acquire this social communication foundation with ease; however, those with social learning challenges (autism spectrum, ADHD, etc.) do not intuitively understand and use these concepts without great effort and direct teaching.
Given these developmental progressions of social learning, it is clear that early development of neurotypical children involves actively learning social information which includes the awareness that we all think about each other’s different thoughts and feelings. It appears that this core conceptual information is required for even pre-school children to “act appropriately” with others, hence producing “good social skills.” Thus, it is expected that social awareness of socially related concepts (you feel and think differently from me) are critical for students to produce expected social behavior (social skills).
SLPs learn about social pragmatics to explore how we use social communication skills. Based on the above information it can be argued that not only should we as SLPs focus on the communication skill production itself but also on the knowledge students need to acquire in order to understand why they should produce this skill. For example, we often focus on teaching students the behavioral social skill of “eye-contact” by asking them to “look at me,” but in reality many higher level students with ASD we have worked with lack development of the social concept (e.g. Joint Attention) to know to follow the iris of people’s eyes to determine where they are looking and then infer what they might be thinking about. Our treatment takes on new meaning when we teach students the social concept that supports how we use the social skill we call “eye-contact.” This type of teaching we refer to as teaching “Social Thinking and related social skills.” This deeper study of how we learn socially and then develop related treatment strategies for those who lack in social pragmatic development has only recently taken on new urgency with the increasing presence of students on our caseload with reasonable verbal cognition and language skills who have diagnoses such as Asperger Syndrome, PDD-NOS and Nonverbal Learning Disability. Given their astute technical language skills and strong concrete learning style, they are critical consumers of the information we teach them. They often ask “why do I have to do it that way?” Teaching Social Thinking and related social skills appears to provide a deeper answer as well as lessons to increase social pragmatic functioning. But, how do we, as professionals, learn about the social thinking associated with production of social skills? Below is one framework to explore this information.
The ILAUGH Model of Social Thinking
The ILAUGH Model of Social Thinking, developed by Winner (2000), is a theoretical model for use by parents and professionals to explore some of the many variables that lend themselves to what we call good “communication” or “problem solving” skills across the day. Winner created this based on her observations of what her students with social learni