The Production of Pronouns and Verb Inflections by Italian Children with ASD: A New Dataset in a Null Subject Language

Implicit Grammatical Gender Representation in Italian Children with Autism without Intellectual/Language Disorder

Grammatical language development in individuals with autism (without intellectual/language impairment) is mostly qualitatively comparable to language development in typically developing children of the same age. The majority of tasks used to study grammatical development require explicit performance (use of verbal language). Here, we administered an implicit categorization task (by biological sex) to understand which markers children use to implicitly infer grammatical gender representation in Italian (a gendered language where grammatical gender can be inferred via a determiner and/or word ending). Participants were asked to categorize photos of animals, relying on the names that differed in regard to the grammatical markers involved (i.e., lexical semantic, phonological, syntactic or phonological + syntactic). Children with autism displayed the same patterns observed in typically developing children: the lexical-semantic marker was categorized more accurately, followed in decreasing order by the phonological-syntactic marker and the phonological marker. The syntactic marker was the most difficult to categorize for both groups. In addition, children with autism showed an advantage in grammatical gender representation when using formal/grammatical markers than when using lexical/semantic markers. Such an implicit assessment allows for the investigation of more nuanced linguistic representations other than those expressed by traditional assessments.

How do parents refer to their children while playing? A cross-linguistic comparison of parental input to Bulgarian- and English-speaking children with ASD

Instances of person-reference, in the form of personal pronouns, names, or terms of endearment, are frequently used in child-directed speech. Examining this aspect of parental input is especially relevant to children with autism, who experience difficulties with person-reference. In this study, we compared the person-reference during parent-child interactions of Bulgarian (N=37) and English-speaking (N=37) parents of children with autism, who were matched on the language ability of their child. English-speaking parents used significantly more personal pronouns to refer to their children, while Bulgarian-speaking parents used the child's name more along with kinship terms. Furthermore, Bulgarian-speaking parents used significantly more different ways to refer to their child. These group differences were interpreted in the context of structural differences in the pronominal systems of Bulgarian and English, and in terms of culturally different discourse practices.

Language in autism: domains, profiles and co-occurring conditions

This article reviews the current knowledge state on pragmatic and structural language abilities in autism and their potential relation to extralinguistic abilities and autistic traits. The focus is on questions regarding autism language profiles with varying degrees of (selective) impairment and with respect to potential comorbidity of autism and language impairment: Is language impairment in autism the co-occurrence of two distinct conditions (comorbidity), a consequence of autism itself (no comorbidity), or one possible combination from a series of neurodevelopmental properties (dimensional approach)? As for language profiles in autism, three main groups are identified, namely, (i) verbal autistic individuals without structural language impairment, (ii) verbal autistic individuals with structural language impairment, and (iii) minimally verbal autistic individuals. However, this tripartite distinction hides enormous linguistic heterogeneity. Regarding the nature of language impairment in autism, there is currently no model of how language difficulties may interact with autism characteristics and with various extralinguistic cognitive abilities. Building such a model requires carefully designed explorations that address specific aspects of language and extralinguistic cognition. This should lead to a fundamental increase in our understanding of language impairment in autism, thereby paving the way for a substantial contribution to the question of how to best characterize neurodevelopmental disorders.

Are palm reversals the pronoun reversals of sign language? Evidence from a fingerspelling task

Acquisition of pronominal forms by children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) continues to garner significant attention due to the unusual ways that such children produce and comprehend them. In particular, pronoun reversal errors (e.g., using the 2nd-person pronoun "you" to refer to oneself) have been noted in the speech of children with ASD since the very first report of the disorder. In more recent years, investigations of the signing of deaf children with ASD have documented a different phenomenon: palm orientation reversals, such that signs typically produced with an outward-facing palm are produced with the palm towards the signer, or vice versa. At the same time, true pronoun reversals have yet to be documented in the signing of deaf children on the autism spectrum. These two curious facts have led us to ask if there is evidence that palm orientation reversals in signed languages and pronoun reversals in spoken languages could be surface manifestations of the same underlying differences present in ASD. In this paper we seek to establish whether there is evidence for such an analogy, by comparing the ages at which the two phenomena appear in both typically-developing (TD) children and those with ASD, the frequency and consistency with which they appear, and their relationships with other linguistic and cognitive skills. Data are presented from a fingerspelling task given to a sample of 17 native-signing children with ASD and 24 native-signing TD children. We conclude that there are provocative parallels between pronoun reversals in spoken languages and palm reversals in signed languages, though more research is needed to definitively answer these questions.