The study considers the impact of cognitive development and discourse-based factors on the ability to understand different types of written texts from middle childhood across adolescence. Reading comprehension was examined by responses to four types of questions — literal, inferential, integrative, and metatextual — based on narrative and expository texts assigned to monolingual Hebrew speakers at four age-schooling levels (4th, 7th, 11th graders, and adults). Distributional analyses revealed higher scores on comprehension of narrative compared with expository texts in the two younger groups, with comprehension continuing to improve in both genres up to 11th grade and responses of high-school students close to those of the adult participants. Qualitative evaluations of responses to the different types of questions revealed progression from a superficial grasp of basic information to in-depth interpretation of the text as a whole, with more advanced reading comprehension manifested by the ability to combine an integrative approach to text comprehension with attention to specific details and to process information from diverse points of view.

The study examined linguistic flexibility of Hebrew-speaking students from middle childhood to adolescence compared with adults on tasks requiring them to alternate between different versions of varied linguistic stimuli. Lexical flexibility was tested by constructing different words with a shared root and a shared prosodic template; Hebrew-specific morpho-syntactic abilities were tested by alternating between bound inflected and free syntactic forms of verbs and nouns; syntactic tasks involved shifting between direct and indirect speech, between single-clause and bi-clausal sentences with subordinate or coordinate clauses, and construction of well-formed sentences from scrambled groups of words. Across the board, participants encountered more difficulty in shifting from low frequency, high-register, structurally more fused constructions typical of written usage to their everyday, more transparent options than vice versa. High-school adolescents responded like the adults on most tasks, differing significantly from grade-school and junior-high-school students. These results are interpreted in terms of linguistic and developmental variables underlying the protracted path to acquisition of high-level linguistic flexibility.

Objective: The purpose of the present study was to assess how adolescents with autism who vary in the severity of autistic characteristics judge the emotional state of the speaker when lexical and prosodic information is congruent or incongruent. Participants: Eighty participants, 24 autistic and 56 typically developing (TD) subjects participated: (a) 11 autistic adolescents between 9.5 and 16.83 years old, studying at general education settings (AA1), (b) 13 autistic adolescents between 15.91 and 20.33 years old, studying at a special school (AA2), and (c) 56 TD subjects between 6 and 29 years old. Listeners were required to judge the emotional meaning of words (sad/happy) in congruent conditions and incongruent conditions. Results: (a) All participants judged lexical and prosodic meaning separately with high accuracy, (b) all participants showed prolonged reaction times in the incongruent compared to the congruent condition, (c) AA1 relied on prosodic information in the incongruent condition similarly to TD 9-15 year olds and TD adults, (d) AA2 and TD 6-8 year olds did not rely on prosodic information in the incongruent condition, and (e) both education placements, the severity of autistic characteristics and nonverbal IQ contributed to prosodic judgment in the incongruent condition in autistic adolescents. Conclusions: The two groups of autistic adolescents processed both lexical and prosodic information in the incongruent condition. However, the severity of autistic characteristics influenced the preference for prosody.

Objective: The study compared the performance of adolescents with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) to that of age-matched peers with typical development (TD) and cognitive language-matched peers with TD on measures of identification and comprehension of “narrow focus.” Participants: Forty-nine participants, 17 autistic, 17 TD peers matched for age and sex, and 15 TD children matched for expressive vocabulary participated in the study. Method: The Hebrew Narrow Focus Test (HNFT) was used. The HNFT includes 3 subtests. The first subtest (A) required identification of the stressed word in the sentence based on psychoacoustic abilities alone. The second (B) and third (C) subtests required understanding the meaning of focused stress in different contexts. In subtest B, the meaning of “narrow focus” was to contrast other possibilities related to the lexical-grammatical role of the stressed word in the sentence, whereas in subtest C, the meaning was to indicate a mistake. Results: ASD participants showed reduced performance compared to peers across all the subtests of the HNFT, but similar performance compared to TD children in subtests A and B and better performance on subtest C. A significant correlation was found between the Raven test for assessing nonverbal intelligence and subtests B and C of the HNFT in the group of adolescents with ASD. Conclusions: Comprehension of narrow focus in adolescents with ASD who study in a special educational system is related to their cognitive-linguistic abilities and not to the autistic condition by itself or to its severity.

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