29 Original Article INTRODUCTION Early language development in a child largely depends on the stimulation provided by the environment through interaction. Child’s immediate environment is enriched with the interaction by the primary caregiver who is often the parents or grandparents. The stimulation from parents is an important variable in the development of a child’s lan- guage. This parental input acts as a foundation stone for further language development especially for children with disabilities. The parent-child interaction can be interac- tional and directed with a specific purpose through gestures, vocalization or verbaliza- tion [1]. A healthy caregiver-child contact is facilitated by the desire between commu- Purpose: Current study is designed to analyze the quantity and quality of parental language during parent-child interaction in the natural environment in both typically developing and in children with autism spectrum disorder. Methods: A total of 10 primary caregivers mainly parents in which 5 participants were par- ents of children with autism spectrum disorder and 5 participants were parents of typically developing children. A 10-15 minutes video recording of parent-child interaction was ana- lyzed and drawn into conclusion about the quantity and quality of language used in terms of grammatical language measures, discourse function and pragmatic function. Results: Parents of children with ASD and parents of TD children who were developing nor- mally produced similar amounts of linguistic input, but they differed on certain quality pa- rameters. Parents of TD children use more Mean Length of Utterance. Significant differ- ences were found between the two groups in terms of Discourse function and pragmatic functions. The parents of children with ASD used a comparatively lower number of nouns, verbs, conjunctions and case markers. In Discourse function analysis, significant differences were found in parental responses, number of conversational turns and number of parental responses to child’s initiations. While considering pragmatic/behavioral functions, significant differences were only in questions and expansions. Conclusions: The current study emphasizes the importance of parental language during parent-child interactions, as well as the need to profile the same which would provide pre- cise information on the level of stimulation delivered. Keywords: Autism, Parents, Language stimulation, Parent child interaction © 2022 The Korean Association of Speech- Language Pathologists This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non- Commercial License (https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non- commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Received: March 17, 2022 Revision: April 28, 2022 Accepted: April 28, 2022 Correspondence: P Veena Mohan Department of Neurodevelopmental Sciences, National Institute of Speech and Hearing, NISH Road, Akkulam, Trivandrum, Kerala, India Tel: +91-471-2596919, 259 E-mail: veenam@nish.ac.in Clinical Archives of Communication Disorders / Vol. 7, No. 1:29-42 / April 2022 http://e-cacd.org/ eISSN: 2508-5948 A comparative study on parental language used by parents of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and typically developing children P Veena Mohan 1 , H Marjana Mahasoomi 2 , Divya Anna Davis 2 1 Department of Neurodevelopmental Sciences, National Institute of Speech and Hearing, NISH Road, Akkulam, Trivandrum, Kerala; 2 National Institute of Speech and Hearing, NISH Road, Akkulam, Trivandrum, Kerala, India Open Access https://doi.org/10.21849/cacd.2022.00710