EXPERIMENTAL VISIT
Stimuli
Four familiar objects and twelve novel objects, matched on size, were used to create the stimuli. Each child saw the same eight trials in the same order: two training trials followed by six test trials. Each trial consisted of a familiarization and test phase. During familiarization, children saw videos of a woman sitting at a table with two objects in front of her. Following an animated greeting to signal communicative relevance (Senju and Csibra, 2008), the woman picked up one of the objects (hereafter, the target object) and began labeling it. The speaker manipulated the object while labeling. We chose this design because prior work has demonstrated that this is a context in which autistic children succeed at identifying a target referent (Parish-Morris et al., 2007). It is important to note that this manipulation created a critical difference between these stimuli and the “dyadic bid” stimuli used by Chawarska et al. (2012). While the stimuli were similar in that the speaker directed her attention towards the child while speaking, the motion of the objects as she labeled them added a highly salient nonsocial component to the stimuli, making this design more similar to the “moving toy” condition in the Chawarska et al. (2012) study.