Research School Network: Vocabulary Instruction for Children With and Without Autism: How Much Does Sleep Make a Difference? A guest post from Karen Vaughan

In a guest post for Bradford Research School, Karen Vaughan, PhD student at the University of York, shares her work exploring how children with autism learn new vocabulary and what impact sleep has on success. There is still an opportunity for three more Bradford schools to get involved with the project.

Children with autism often have weak vocabulary knowledge, in the context of generally weak oral language (Ricketts et al., 2013). Laboratory studies of word learning (using computerised explicit instruction) have shown that children with autism are similar to typical peers at the early stages of word learning, but they show greater forgetting at long-term follow up (Fletcher, Knowland, Gaskell, Walker, Norbury & Henderson, 2019; Norbury et al., 2010).

Sleep and language learning

Complementary Learning Systems theory (Davis & Gaskell, 2009) has been used to account for how learning of novel words benefits from a period of sleep (Ashworth et al., 2014; Henderson et al., 2014). It has also been claimed that sleeping sooner after learning has long-term benefits for word learning, particularly for children with weaker vocabulary (James, Gaskell, & Henderson, submitted). We do not know if this applies to children with autism, who have less slow wave sleep than typically developing children (Fletcher et. al, 2019). A further line of research enquiry is to find out whether a parent prompt at bedtime will help children with ASD (and typical peers) to consolidate learning during sleep and remember the meaning of real new words at one month follow up.

Explicit vocabulary instruction

There is growing evidence to suggest that explicit definitions of words may be more useful than linguistic context for learning the phonological and semantic aspects of new words (Lucas et al., 2017; O’Hare et al., 2018, EEF Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools, 2019).

Current research in Bradford schools

We are investigating whether a naturalistic training regime using Oral Language (OL) and explicit vocabulary instruction based on a lesson sequence by the Fischer Family Trust (FFT) is an effective approach to helping children with autism to learn new curriculum-relevant vocabulary. This study involves teaching unfamiliar ​‘tier 2’ words to small groups (n = 3 – 5) of typically developing and children with autism using explicit vocabulary instruction and then testing the learning after sleep at 1 day then 1 month later. Parents also complete a children’s sleep habits questionnaire, so that we can collect data to see how much sleep makes a difference to learning.

Get involved!

Our Sleep, Language and Memory (SLAM) lab at the University of York is currently working with 3 Bradford schools and would like to invite 3 more schools to join this pilot research project, which runs between January and May 2020. This is a great opportunity to test out explicit vocabulary instruction for children with and without autism in your school using experimental design research methods with project management from the University of York.

For more information on how your school can participate please contact:
Karen Vaughan
kv606@​york.​ac.​uk