CSD 2259 Paper

Claire Rembowski

Hahn, Laura J., Nancy C. Brady., Theresa Versaci., “Communicative Use of Triadic Eye Gaze in

Children With Down Syndrome, Autism Spectrum Disorder, and Other Intellectual and

Developmental Disabilities.” American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, vol. 28, no. 4,

2019, pp. 1509–1522., doi:10.1044/2019_ajslp-18-0155.

This article is on the use of the triadic eye gaze in children with disorders such as down

syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, and other intellectual and developmental disorders. The

point of this study is to find statistical data to determine the differences and the amount of usage

of the triadic eye gaze between these different developmental disorders. The article is broken up

into different categories for the different disorders that are mentioned while providing charts and

results from the observations. This study on the triadic eye gaze relates to speech-language

pathology because it is apart of development for communication and engagement.

Triadic eye gaze is a prelinguistic form of early communication and engagement which is

tested through assessments on children with neurodevelopment disorders. The results from this

study concluded that the usage has a wide variety in the range of correlation between these

different disorders. It is determined that down syndrome has the highest usage of the triadic eye

gaze over the other two categories, but this can be due to difficulty in providing eye contact for

some of these neurodevelopmental disorders within the individual. The triadic eye gaze can help

determine if a child is on the right track for developing social interactions and can also help

guide them in the right direction. According to this article teaching or encouraging the triadic eye

gaze is proven to help social engagement and language development while not having developed

words yet there are alternative prelinguistic methods to practice. Including gestures with the
CSD 2259 Paper
Claire Rembowski
triadic eye gaze is proven to make communication a lot more clear and beneficial for the

conversation.

In conclusion, this article had a positive impact on me and I highly recommend it to my

classmates because it provided in depth information on the triadic eye gaze which proved to me

that there’s more to it than just a “gaze”. I liked how the author categorized it into the different

neurodevelopmental disorders because it showed how a child with each disorder would choose to

use prelinguistic forms of communication through the triadic eye gaze or not. This study is an

area of interest for me because I want to put my focus more on children for speech and language

development, but I also am really into child development of the brain and social engagement

with a psychology focus. Through this study I learned that prelinguistic forms of communication

have more impact on a child’s social/language development than it is easily recognized and it

takes different methods to efficiently work for an individual’s needs.