The Use of Linguistic Cues in Sentence Comprehension by Mandarin-Speaking Children with High-Functioning Autism.
- Resource Type
- Article
- Authors
- Zhou, Peng, ; Crain, Stephen; Gao, Liqun; Jia, Meixiang
- Source
- Journal of Autism & Developmental Disorders; Jan2017, Vol. 47 Issue 1, p17-32, 16p, 2 Color Photographs, 3 Charts
- Subject
- Autism
Comparative studies
Experimental design
Intelligence tests
Data analysis
Phonological awareness
Analysis of variance
Linguistics
Classification of mental disorders
Probability theory
Research funding
Statistical sampling
Statistics
Effect sizes (Statistics)
Prompts (Psychology)
Repeated measures design
Executive function
Descriptive statistics
Mean length of utterance
China
- Language
- ISSN
- 01623257
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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]