Linguistic characteristics of individuals with high functioning autism and Asperger syndrome

Personal Pronoun Errors in Form versus Meaning Produced by Children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder

The current study investigates whether the types of pronominal errors children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) make are different from those of their TD peers at similar stages of language development. A recent review about language acquisition in ASD argues that these children show relative deficits in assigning/extending lexical meaning alongside relative strengths in morpho-syntax (Naigles & Tek, 2017). Pronouns provide an ideal test case for this argument because they are marked both for grammatical features (case) and features that reflect qualities of the referent itself (gender and number) or the referent's role in conversation (person). The form-meaning hypothesis predicts that children with ASD should struggle more with these latter features. The current study tests this hypothesis with data from a caregiver report, completed by caregivers of 151 children with and without ASD. Reported pronominal errors were categorized as meaning or form and compared across groups. In accordance with the form-meaning hypothesis, a higher proportion of children with ASD make meaning errors than they do form errors, and significantly more of them make meaning errors than TD children do.

In their own words: The impact of subtle language and communication difficulties as described by autistic girls and boys without intellectual disability

LAY ABSTRACT

Subtle language and communication difficulties are experienced by many autistic individuals even when they do not have additional learning disabilities. These difficulties may affect a person's day-to-day living, social relationships and emotional well-being. However, currently, there is not much research into this topic. To date, no one has asked autistic children about their own language and communication difficulties or how they feel it affects them. Asking the children could provide valuable new insights. In this study, 12 autistic children (9-14 years), without learning disability, were interviewed on this topic. We developed interview questions, resources and interview procedures with the support of the autistic community. We also worked with an autistic researcher to analyse our results. We aimed to get the most genuine report of the autistic child's experiences. Our results showed that the children could give detailed insight into their language and communication difficulties if they were given the right support. They told us about how subtle language and communication difficulties affected their ability to learn, take part in certain activities and seek help. They talked about how subtle difficulties affect their ability to talk to new people, talk in groups and ultimately make friends. They also told us about the emotional upset that these subtle difficulties could have. They suggest that communication breakdown leads to negative feelings, but also that negative feelings can lead to more difficulties explaining themselves. The results of this study suggest that we should do more research on the effects of subtle language and communication difficulties. There are also implications for clinical practice. We should identify subtle language and communication difficulties through thorough assessment because these are often missed. We should also develop therapy and strategies that are aimed at individuals with subtle language and communication difficulties because this could help prevent additional difficulties with learning, help-seeking, friendship-making and emotional well-being.

Personal pronoun usage in maternal input to infants at high vs. low risk for autism spectrum disorder

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are prone to personal pronoun difficulties. This paper investigates maternal input as a potential contributing factor, focusing on an early developmental stage before ASD diagnosis. Using Quigley and McNally's (2013) corpus of maternal speech to infants (3-19 months; N = 19) who are either at high or low risk for a diagnosis of ASD (Quigley & McNally, 2013), we asked whether mothers used fewer pronouns with high-risk infants. Indeed, high-risk infants heard fewer second-person pronouns relative to their names than low-risk infants. We further investigated the contexts in which mothers were using infants' names. Our results indicated that mothers of high-risk infants often used the infants' names simply to get their attention by calling them. We suggest that high-risk infants may thus hear relatively fewer pronouns because their mothers spend more time trying to get their attention. This may be related to differences in social-communicative behavior between low-risk and high-risk infants.

Disrupted behaviour in grammatical morphology in French speakers with autism spectrum disorders

Mixed and inconsistent findings have been reported across languages concerning grammatical morphology in speakers with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Some researchers argue for a selective sparing of grammar whereas others claim to have identified grammatical deficits. The present study aimed to investigate this issue in 26 participants with ASD speaking European French who were matched on age, gender and SES to 26 participants with typical development (TD). The groups were compared regarding their productivity and accuracy of syntactic and agreement categories using the French MOR part-of-speech tagger available from the CHILDES. The groups significantly differed in productivity with respect to nouns, adjectives, determiners, prepositions and gender markers. Error analysis revealed that ASD speakers exhibited a disrupted behaviour in grammatical morphology. They made gender, tense and preposition errors and they omitted determiners and pronouns in nominal and verbal contexts. ASD speakers may have a reduced sensitivity to perceiving and processing the distributional structure of syntactic categories when producing grammatical morphemes and agreement categories. The theoretical and cross-linguistic implications of these findings are discussed.

Relaciones entre el desarrollo morfosintáctico y la Teoría de la Mente: Estudio de un caso de un niño con Síndrome de Asperger

La evidencia empírica recogida hasta la fecha ofrece argumentos a favor del indudable papel que desempeña la dimensión morfosintáctica del lenguaje en el desarrollo de habilidades de Teoría de la Mente. No obstante, un gran porcentaje de estas investigaciones se ha llevado a cabo con poblaciones de niños con desarrollo típico, por lo que se requieren más estudios que analicen estos aspectos en niños con síndrome de Asperger. El objetivo de este trabajo ha sido examinar el desarrollo morfosintáctico con relación a las habilidades de Teoría de la Mente de un niño Asperger. Se han estudiado además sus habilidades narrativas por ser un factor clave en el desempeño en tareas que implican directamente el desarrollo de capacidades de Teoría de la Mente, adoptándose para ello el método cualitativo de estudio de caso (n=1) con un enfoque interpretativo. Los datos extraídos indican que el mayor número de errores morfosintácticos detectados en este niño se relacionan con la construcción de complementos oracionales y la utilización de pronombres personales. La evaluación de estos aspectos utilizando secuencias narrativas ha permitido averiguar que un gran porcentaje de estos errores se localiza en las tareas que requieren la implicación directa de habilidades de Teoría de la Mente, mientras que las narraciones más ricas y completas se han producido en aquellas historias en las que no se han visto comprometidas estas habilidades.

The Use of Linguistic Cues in Sentence Comprehension by Mandarin-Speaking Children with High-Functioning Autism

Two studies were conducted to investigate how high-functioning children with autism use different linguistic cues in sentence comprehension. Two types of linguistic cues were investigated: word order and morphosyntactic cues. The results show that children with autism can use both types of cues in sentence comprehension. However, compared to age-matched typically developing peers, children with autism relied significantly more on word order cues and exhibited significantly more difficulties in interpreting sentences in which there was a conflict between the morphosyntactic cue and the word order cue. We attribute the difficulties exhibited by children with autism to their deficits in executive function. We then discuss the implications of the findings for understanding the nature of the sentence processing mechanism in autism.

Grammatical aspect is a strength in the language comprehension of young children with autism spectrum disorder

PURPOSE

The comprehension of tense/aspect morphology by children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) was assessed via Intermodal Preferential Looking (IPL) to determine whether this population's difficulties with producing these morphemes extended to their comprehension.

METHOD

Four-year-old participants were assessed twice, 4 months apart. They viewed a video that presented side-by-side ongoing and completed events paired with familiar verbs with past tense and progressive morphology. Their eye movements were recorded and coded offline; the IPL measures included percentage of looking time at, and latency of first look to, the matching scene. Spontaneous speech samples were also obtained and coded for number of words, past tense, and progressive inflections.

RESULTS

Relative to their baseline preferences, these 4-year-old children with ASD looked more quickly to and longer at the matching scene for both morphemes. Children who produced more words, including progressive and past morphemes, and those who performed better on standardized language assessments demonstrated better comprehension of -ing.

CONCLUSIONS

Overall, these children with ASD demonstrated consistent comprehension of grammatical aspect morphology; moreover, their degree of comprehension was found to correlate with spontaneous production and standardized test scores.

A meta-analysis of differences in IQ profiles between individuals with Asperger's disorder and high-functioning autism

A meta-analysis was performed to examine differences in IQ profiles between individuals with Asperger's disorder (AspD) and high-functioning autism (HFA). Fifty-two studies were included for this study. The results showed that (a) individuals with AspD had significantly higher full-scale IQ, verbal IQ (VIQ), and performance IQ (PIQ) than did individuals with HFA; (b) individuals with AspD had significantly higher VIQ than PIQ; and (c) VIQ was similar to PIQ in individuals with HFA. These findings seem to suggest that AspD and HFA are two different subtypes of Autism. The implications of the present findings to DSM-5 Autism Spectrum Disorder are discussed.

Inflectional morphology in high-functioning autism: Evidence for speeded grammatical processing

Autism is characterized by language and communication deficits. We investigated grammatical and lexical processes in high-functioning autism by contrasting the production of regular and irregular past-tense forms. Boys with autism and typically-developing control boys did not differ in accuracy or error rates. However, boys with autism were significantly faster than controls at producing rule-governed past-tenses (slip-slipped, plim-plimmed, bring-bringed), though not lexically-dependent past-tenses (bring-brought, squeeze-squeezed, splim-splam). This pattern mirrors previous findings from Tourette syndrome attributed to abnormalities of frontal/basal-ganglia circuits that underlie grammar. We suggest a similar abnormality underlying language in autism. Importantly, even when children with autism show apparently normal language (e.g., in accuracy or with diagnostic instruments), processes and/or brain structures subserving language may be atypical in the disorder.

Asperger's disorder will be back

This review focuses on identifying up-to-date number of publications that compared DSM-IV/ICD-10 Asperger's disorder (AspD) to Autistic Disorder/High-functioning Autism (AD/HFA). One hundred and twenty-eight publications were identified through an extensive search of major electronic databases and journals. Based on more than 90 clinical variables been investigated, 94 publications concluded that there were statistically significant or near significant level of quantitative and/or qualitative differences between AspD and AD/HFA groups; 4 publications found both similarities and differences between the two groups; 30 publications concluded with no differences between the two groups. Although DSM-5 ASD will eliminate Asperger's disorder. However, it is plausible to predict that the field of ASD would run full circle during the next decade or two and that AspD will be back in the next edition of DSM.

Research review: structural language in autistic spectrum disorder - characteristics and causes

BACKGROUND

Structural language anomalies or impairments in autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) are theoretically and practically important, although underrecognised as such. This review aims to highlight the ubiquitousness of structural language anomalies and impairments in ASD, and to stimulate investigation of their immediate causes and implications for intervention.

METHOD

Studies of structural language in ASD are reviewed (based on a search of the literature and selected as meeting defined inclusion criteria), and explanatory hypotheses are discussed.

RESULTS

Some individuals with ASD never acquire language. Amongst those who do, language abilities range from clinically normal (ALN) to various degrees of impairment (ALI). Developmental trajectories and individual profiles are diverse, and minority subgroups have been identified. Specifically: language is commonly but not always delayed and delayed early language is always characterised by impaired comprehension and odd utterances, and sometimes by deviant articulation and grammar. Nevertheless, by school age an 'ASD-typical' language profile emerges from group studies, with articulation and syntax least affected, and comprehension, semantics and certain facets of morphology most affected. Thus, even individuals with ALN have poor comprehension relative to expressive language; also semantic-processing anomalies and idiosyncratic word usage. It is argued that impaired socio-emotional-communicative relating, atypical sensory-perceptual processing, and uneven memory/learning abilities may underlie shared language anomalies across the spectrum; and that varying combinations of low nonverbal intelligence, semantic memory impairment and comorbidities including specific language impairment (SLI), hearing impairment, and certain medical syndromes underlie ALI and variation in individual profiles.

CONCLUSIONS

Structural language is universally affected in ASD, due to a complex of shared and unshared causal factors. There is an urgent need for more research especially into the characteristics and causes of clinically significant language impairments.

Writing, Asperger syndrome and theory of mind

This research compared the written compositions of 16 adults with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders and 16 neurotypical control participants, and examined the influence of theory of mind on their writing. Participants ranging in age from 17 years to 42 years, matched on Vocabulary subtest scores from the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (1997), completed the Social Attribution Task and wrote an expository and a narrative text. Texts were assessed on 18 variables representing quality, mechanics, and length. It was found that adults with HFASD wrote lower quality narrative and expository texts, and narratives of shorter length. Theory of mind was positively associated with writing quality and text length across both genres.

Confusion and inconsistency in diagnosis of Asperger syndrome: a review of studies from 1981 to 2010

This paper presents a review of past and current research on the diagnosis of Asperger syndrome (AS) in children. It is suggested that the widely used criteria for diagnosing AS in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)-IV are insufficient and invalid for a reliable diagnosis of AS. In addition, when these diagnostic criteria are applied, there is the potential bias of receiving a diagnosis towards the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum. Through a critical review of 69 research studies carried out between 1981 and 2010, this paper shows that six possible criteria for diagnosing AS (specifically, the age at which signs and symptoms related to autism become apparent, language and social communication abilities, intellectual abilities, motor or movement skills, repetitive patterns of behaviour and the nature of social interaction) overlap with the criteria for diagnosing autism. However, there is a possibility that some finer differences exist in the nature of social interaction, motor skills and speech patterns between groups with a diagnosis of AS and autism. These findings are proposed to be of relevance for designing intervention studies aimed at the treatment of specific symptoms in people with an autism spectrum disorder.