Soile Loukusa

• Phd
• University of Oulu

Purpose Children develop social-pragmatic understanding with the help of sensory, cognitive, and linguistic functions by interacting with other people. This study aimed to explore (a) associations between auditory, demographic, cognitive, and linguistic factors and social-pragmatic understanding in children who use bilateral hearing aids (BiHAs) or...

Affektiivista mielen teoriaa eli kykyä tulkita omia ja toisten tunteita ja sen kehittymistä on tutkittu vähän. Mielen teorian tehtävät on helppo pisteyttää oikeaksi tai vääräksi, mutta vähemmälle huomiolle on jäänyt vastausten sisältö. Tämä tutkimus selvittää, miten affektiivisen mielen teorian ymmärtäminen kehittyy ikävuosien 4–8 aikana ja minkäla...

Kertomuksille on tyypillistä, että niissä käsitellään ajatuksia ja tunteita. Tätä ilmentämään tarvitaan mielentilasanoja, jotka ilmaisevat puhujan kognitiivisia tai emotionaalisia tiloja. Kertomuksiin liittyy läheisesti myös kyky tulkita ja tuottaa kommunikaatiotilanteessa ilmenevää kontekstuaalista tietoa. Kertomuksissa tuotettujen mielentilasanoj...

This study investigated the complex relationship between false-belief (FB) understanding, structural language and pragmatic communication in typically developing children. A total of 78 Finnish children, aged from 4 to 6 years, including an equal number of boys and girls, participated in this study. In the first instance, the study explored the rel...

This study aimed to evaluate the effect of linguistic complexity and individual background variables (i.e. linguistic and cognitive abilities, degree of autistic traits, and sex) on speech disfluencies in autistic young adults and controls. Thirty-two 19- to 33-year-old autistic adults and 35 controls participated in this study. The frequency of di...

Difficulties in false belief reasoning are associated with autism spectrum. False belief tasks tend to be easy to administer and code, and thus are often used for testing purposes. However, the amount of information that can be gleaned from this type of assessment task goes beyond correct/wrong score attribution. Instead, fine-grained information m...

Introduction: Previous research on communicative development of children with hearing loss (HL) has focused strongly on speech and language abilities. Despite the importance of social-pragmatic abilities for well-being and involvement, social-pragmatic development of children with HL has remained sparsely studied. This study aimed to explore the so...

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate several possible factor structures of the Autism Spectrum Screening Questionnaire (ASSQ). Materials and methods: We used the 27-item screening tool for school-aged children in a general population of 8-year-old children (n = 3,538) and compared the occurring solutions to previously published fact...

Purpose This prospective longitudinal study aimed to explore (a) the development of social-pragmatic understanding of children with bilateral hearing aids (BiHAs), bilateral cochlear implants (BiCIs), and typical hearing (TH) between the ages of 4 and 6 years and (b) group differences between children with BiHAs, BiCIs, and TH. Method The Pragma t...

Effective communication is a fundamental aspect of children’s daily living, enabling interaction with adults and peers. A rich literature suggests that communicative abilities develop with age, while little is known about cross-cultural differences and similarities. This study presents a comparison of the communicative performance of Finnish (n = 1...

Purpose The purpose of this study was to examine the nature of speech disfluencies in autistic young adults and controls by using a wide-range disfluency classification of typical disfluencies (TD; i.e., filled pauses, revisions, abandoned utterances, and multisyllable word and phrase repetitions), stuttering-like disfluencies (SLD; i.e., sound and...

Background Despite increasing knowledge of social communication skills of autistic peole, the interrelatedness of different skills such as non‐linguistic comprehension, social inference and empathizing skills is not much known about. A better understanding of the complex interplay between different domains of social communication helps us to develo...

Since prior research has mostly focused on children, less is known about how autistic adults and adults with sub-clinical autistic traits interpret pragmatically complex social situations and the kind of narrative discourse they produce. 32 autistic young adults, 18 young adults with sub-clinical autistic traits and 34 non-autistic young adults par...

Introduction : Today, children with hearing loss (HL) are diagnosed and fitted with hearing devices at an early age. However, HL may still influence their communicative development. Thus, we need up-to-date research on how children perform in their everyday environments, such as at home or daycare. This study provides an overview of the communicati...

This study examined social-pragmatic inferencing, visual social attention and physiological reactivity to complex social scenes. Participants were autistic young adults (n = 14) and a control group of young adults (n = 14) without intellectual disability. Results indicate between-group differences in social-pragmatic inferencing, moment-level socia...

This video-based study examines the pragmatic non-verbal comprehension skills and corresponding neural-level findings in young Finnish autistic adults, and controls. Items from the Assessment Battery of Communication (ABaCo) were chosen to evaluate the comprehension of non-verbal communication. Inter-subject correlation (ISC) analysis of the functi...

Autismikirjon piirteet ulottuvat sosiaalisten taitojen, kommunikaation, mielikuvituksen, tarkkaavuuden siirtämisen ja yksityiskohtien huomioimisen alueille. Näillä osa-alueilla esiintyviä piirteitä voidaan seuloa autismikirjon osamäärän (engl. autism spectrum quotient, AQ) avulla. Tämän tutkimuksen tavoitteena on saada suomalaiset viitearvot AQ:lle...

Tarkastelemme referointikeinoja, joita aikuiset autismikirjon henkilöt ja verrokit käyttävät puhuessaan toisen henkilön ajatuksista. Aineisto on kerätty tutkimustilanteessa, jossa tutkittavia pyydetään kertomaan, mitä videolla nähty henkilö voisi ajatella. Tässä tutkimuksessa referointikeinot on luokiteltu kuvaileviksi ja esittäviksi sen mukaan, py...

Aiemmissa tutkimuksissa on saatu ristiriitaisia tuloksia autismikirjon naisten ja miesten tavasta orientoitua sosiaalisiin tilanteisiin, tulkita niitä ja kertoa niistä. Tässä tutkimuksessa tarkastelimme, kuinka autismikirjon naiset (n = 7) ja miehet (n = 24) ja verrokkiryhmän naiset (n = 11) ja miehet (n = 24) kuvaavat sosiopragmaattisesti monimutk...

Efficient communication requires the interplay of linguistic, cognitive and social skills, including the ability to make contextual inferences and to understand others’ intentions and emotions. The capacity to effectively use language in specific contexts (i.e., pragmatic ability) develops with age, and an assessment of this ability is important fo...

Previous studies have suggested that atypical deactivation of functional brain networks contributes to the complex cognitive and behavioral profile associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, these studies have not considered the temporal dynamics of deactivation mechanisms between the networks. In this study, we examined (a) mutual de...

Social and pragmatic difficulties in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are widely recognized, although their underlying neural level processing is not well understood. The aim of this study was to examine the activity of the brain network components linked to social and pragmatic understanding in order to reveal whether complex socio-pragmatic events...

This chapter presents a brief overview of the current situation and development trend of interventions for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in Finland. Interventions, particularly early interventions, are seen crucial for children with ASD in order to support their developing skills. Research has identified multiple interventions that a...

This study investigated whole‐brain dynamic lag pattern variations between neurotypical (NT) individuals and individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) by applying a novel technique called dynamic lag analysis (DLA). The use of 3D magnetic resonance encephalography data with repetition time = 100 msec enables highly accurate analysis of the sp...

Research findings: Narratives have been extensively studied in recent decades, but studies investigating differences and similarities in the narrative features from a cross-cultural or cross-linguistic point of view are limited. This study investigated the narrative language of typically developing monolingual four- and eight-year-old Finnish, Ital...

Pragmatic communication refers to the ability to use language and other expressive means, i.e. non-verbal/extralinguistic means such as gestures and facial expressions, in order to convey and interpret meaning in a specific context. Pragmatic abilities are important in everyday life in interpersonal interactions as they affect the way people commun...

Tässä tutkimuksessa tarkasteltiin 4–8-vuotiaiden (N = 171) tyypillisesti kehittyneiden lasten suoriutumista Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument (ENNI) -kerrontatestissä. Lisäksi tutkittiin testin kykyä erotella lapset, joilla on kielellinen erityisvaikeus (N = 19) tai autismikirjon häiriö (N = 16) ikään ja sukupuoleen kaltaistetuista verrokkilapsis...

This three-year follow-up study investigated the associations of narrative and reading skills in typically developing Finnish children. Twenty children performed narrative retelling and story generation tasks twice, at five and eight years of age. Reading comprehension and word recognition tests were performed at the age of eight. Narratives were a...

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By utilizing the Pragma test this study investigated how sixteen five- to ten-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and sixteen typically developing (TD) children comprehended contextually challenging scenarios demanding 1) contextual inference with theory of mind (ToM), 2) contextual inference without ToM, 3) relevant use of langua...

This study examined the development of social-pragmatic comprehension in 170 Finnish four- to eight-year-old children. The children were asked to respond to socially and contextually demanding questions targeting their social-pragmatic language processing, and to explain their correct answers in order to elicit their awareness of how they had deriv...

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a common neuropsychiatric disorder diagnosed on the basis of inattention as well as hyperactivity and impulsivity symptoms. These symptoms include and cause many kinds of pragmatic difficulties. These difficulties are manifested both in terms of understanding and expressing verbal and nonverbal language....

The aim of the current study was to investigate subtle characteristics of social perception and interpretation in high-functioning individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), and to study the relation between watching and interpreting. As a novelty, we used an approach that combined moment-by-moment eye tracking and verbal assessment. Sixtee...

Severe to profound hearing impairment may affect communicative development in many ways (Moeller et al., 2007). During the recent years, early bilateral implantation has become more common. However, little is known about communicative development in Finnish children after early bilateral cochlear implantation. The aim of the present study was to in...

Jopa yli 95 % kuulovikaisista lapsista syntyy kuuleville vanhemmille (Mitchell & Karchmer, 2004), ja vanhemmat usein toivovat, että lapsi omaksuisi heidän äidinkieltään. Jos lapsella on vaikea tai erittäin vaikea kuulovika eikä hän hyödy perinteisistä kuulokojeista, hän voi saada yhden tai kaksi sisäkorvaistutetta. Varhaisella sisäkorvaistutteiden...

Background: Previous studies investigating neuropsychological functioning of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have only analysed certain abilities, such as executive functions or language. While comprehensive assessment of the neuropsychological profile of children with ASD has been the focus of recent research, most of the published e...

Kerronta edellyttää monenlaisen kielellis-kognitiivisen tiedon yhteensovittamista, mutta kerronnan ja työmuistin yhteyttä on tutkittu vähän. Tässä tutkimuksessa tarkasteltiin kerronnan ja työmuistin välistä yhteyttä käyttäen kahta erilaista kerrontatehtävää: tarinan luomista ja toistokerrontaa. Tehtävät eroavat toisistaan siten, että toistokerronta...

Investigating pragmatic skills is essential, because pragmatic skills are known to be related to self-image, the ability of building positive peer relationships (Loukusa, Paavola, & Leiwo, 2011), and academic skills (Thagard, Hilsmier, & Easter-Brooks, 2011). Still, there are hardly any studies published on pragmatic development of children with he...

When importing screening questionnaires of ASD, it has been found that parental interpretation/reporting of autistic traits may be culturally influenced. In the current study, our aim was preliminary evaluation of the Finnish parent rated SRS in order to determine whether the measure would show promise as an aid in screening. The study sample consi...

This study examined linguistic and pragmatic aspects of narrative abilities of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which have not been studied thoroughly and not at all in Finnish. Sixteen five- to ten-year-old Finnish high-functioning children with ASD (mean age 7;7 years) and 16 age-matched typically developing children (mean age 7;5 ye...

Background: Social perception skills, such as understanding the mind and emotions of others, affect children's communication abilities in real-life situations. In addition to autism spectrum disorder (ASD), there is increasing knowledge that children with specific language impairment (SLI) also demonstrate difficulties in their social perception a...

Objective: The aim of this study was to explore whether children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have language and/or pragmatic difficulties compared to typically developing children. Methods: Nineteen children with ADHD (age 5-12 years) and nineteen typically developing children (age 5-8 years) were evaluated using the Finn...

This study focuses on the development of narrative structure and the relationship between narrative productivity and event content. A total of 172 Finnish children aged between four and eight participated. Their picture-elicited narrations were analysed for productivity, syntactic complexity, referential cohesion and event content. Each measure sho...

Abstract This study investigates narratives of Finnish children with specific language impairment (SLI) from linguistic and pragmatic perspectives, in order to get a comprehensive overview of these children's narrative abilities. Nineteen children with SLI (mean age 6;1 years) and 19 typically developing age-matched children participated in the stu...

Childhood autism, Asperger's syndrome and atypical autism together make up autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) with a prevalence of 0.6-0.7%. These disorders are defined by qualitative impairments in social interaction, qualitative abnormalities in communication, and by restricted, stereotyped, repetitive patterns of behaviour, interests and activitie...

This review summarizes studies involving pragmatic language comprehension and inference abilities in individuals with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism. Systematic searches of three electronic databases, selected journals, and reference lists identified 20 studies meeting the inclusion criteria. These studies were evaluated in terms of:...

The communication skills of typically developing Finnish-speaking children between three and six years of age were examined using the Children's Communication Checklist (CCC). The differences between the boys and girls were also investigated. Results showed that the performance of the three-year-old children differed on the Speech subscale of the C...

This research explores, within the framework of Relevance Theory, how children's ability to answer questions and explain their answers develops between the ages of 3 and 9 years. Two hundred and ten normally developing Finnish-speaking children participated in this study. The children were asked questions requiring processing of inferential meaning...

This paper presents some findings about studies investigating how children's ability to answer pragmatically demanding questions and explain their correct answers develops between the ages of 3 and 9 years in Finnish children (Loukusa, 2007; Loukusa, Leinonen & Ryder, 2007; Loukusa, Ryder, & Leinonen, in press). In this paper we summarize the resul...

Development of comprehension of ironic utterances in 3- to 9-year-old Finnish-speaking children This study explores the comprehension of simple ironic utterances in 210 Finnish children aged from 3 to 9 years. If the child answered the question correctly, he/she was asked to explain correct answers. The results indicated that there was large indivi...

Unlabelled: This study examined irrelevant/incorrect answers produced by children with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism (7-9-year-olds and 10-12-year-olds) and normally developing children (7-9-year-olds). The errors produced were divided into three types: in Type 1, the child answered the original question incorrectly, in Type 2, the...

This research explores the development of pragmatic comprehension within the framework of relevance theory. Participants were 210 typically developing Finnish children aged from 3 to 9 years. The children were asked questions targeting the pragmatic processes of reference assignment, enrichment and implicature, as proposed by relevance theory. Resu...

Utilizing relevance theory, this study investigated the ability of children with Asperger syndrome (AS) and high-functioning autism (HFA) to use context when answering questions and when giving explanations for their correct answers. Three groups participated in this study: younger AS/HFA group (age 7-9, n=16), older AS/HFA group (age 10-12, n=23)...

Goal: The goal of this symposium is to identify ‘state-of-the-art’ strategies for the use of antipsychotic medications in the management of children and adolescents with major psychiatric disorders. Learning objectives: 1. Define pediatric populations for whom second-generation antipsychotics are indicated 2. Identify the role of second-generation...