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Sentence comprehension in children with autism

Symposium 2-2Time:08:30 - 10:00

Peng Zhou1
1Tsinghua University, China


The present paper reports the findings of two studies that were designed to investigate how high-functioning children with autism use different linguistic cues in sentence comprehension. Two types of linguistic cues were investigated: word order cues and morphosyntactic cues. 75 four- and five-year-old children with autism (diagnosed using the DSM-IV-TR and the ADOS) and 80 age-matched typically developing children participated in the studies. The results show that children with autism were sensitive to both word order and morphosyntactic cues in sentence comprehension. However, compared to their age-matched typically developing peers, children with autism relied significantly more on the word order cue and exhibited significantly more difficulties in interpreting sentences in which the interpretation led by the morphosyntactic cue contradicts the interpretation led by the word order cue (Study 1). We propose that the difficulties experienced by the autism children are due to their problems in revising the initial interpretation initiated by the word order cue when they later encountered the morphosyntactic cue in the sentence. This proposal is supported by the findings of Study 2. We found that children with autism were able to use the morphosyntactic cue as effectively as their age-matched typically developing peers, when the morphosyntactic cue became the first cue that children could use in a sentence, and the use of the cue would lead to the correct interpretation of the sentence without requiring a revision of a previously built interpretation. We then discuss the implications of the current findings for understanding the nature of the sentence processing mechanism in children with autism.

Online Submission Registration Conference Program

 Important Dates

Submissions Open:
December 10, 2016

Symposia submissions due:
March 1, 2017

Abstract submissions due:
April 10, 2017

Authors will be notified of decisions by:
May 20-22, 2017

Registration open:
May 21, 2017

Conference:
September 1-3, 2017