Advanced syntax and primary pragmatics in children with ASD.

Abstract

Difficulties with communication are one of the defining characteristics of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), whereas language abilities vary. Language, however, encompasses a vast array of knowledge. Lexical knowledge includes, for example, the ability to comprehend and produce a single vocabulary item, such as the verb kick. To learn this word, the language-learning child must categorize it as a verb and work out its meaning (e.g., to strike out with a foot). If she wishes to use this verb to refer to a past event, this requires morphological knowledge, such that as a regular verb, it takes the suffix -ed in the past tense. However, to use this word in a sentence, the child must also understand its syntactic properties. Kick, for example, needs an object, as well as a subject. This rudimentary syntactic knowledge will prevent her from producing illicit sentences such as "*Kicked the ball" or "*He kicked" yet permit "He kicked the ball." On the basis of these simple examples, language appears to use literal knowledge and a predictable rule-based set of skills. However, if we return to the simple declarative, "He kicked the ball," we can see that a listener cannot lean on any aspect of linguistic knowledge mentioned so far to establish the reference of the pronoun. Lexical and morphological knowledge indicate that a singular male subject is intended, but that is all, and syntactic knowledge does not contribute anything in this respect. To recover the pronoun's reference (i.e., its antecedent), attendance to the context in which the sentence is uttered is required. When people go beyond so-called computational components of language to work out who is being referred to, they are using pragmatic knowledge. This pragmatic skill enables them to choose a referent based on the degree of context provided. Sometimes the referent will be unequivocally linked to one antecedent (perhaps only one person has been mentioned in the preceding discourse), but on other occasions, several possible referents might be available so the listener must make a decision, somehow attributing the contenders with different weights in terms of the likelihood of their being the intended referent.The current study taps precisely into this skill. We compare examples of language (shown in examples 1 and 2 below), that might be expected to cause children with ASD difficulty. The difficulty is anticipated because the sentences call on either quite advanced syntactic knowledge, as in (1), or syntactic and pragmatic knowledge, as in (2), to work out who is being referred to in the bracketed clause.(1) and (2), for example, comprise a main clause and an embedded clause that lacks an overt subject. Additionally, (2) requires the use of contextual knowledge

Contrasting Complement Control, Temporal Adjunct Control and Controlled Verbal Gerund Subjects in ASD: The Role of Contextual Cues in Reference Assignment

“…On this basis, we can conclude that the populations are responding in a remarkably similar way to the pragmatic leads. The results are also in line with those reported in Janke and Perovic (2016), where that HFA population also showed no difference in performance on this construction from their matched TD controls.…”

“…All three groups, therefore, recognized the obligatory syntactic relation between the ec in the controlled complement and the object in the matrix clause. These results support the two earlier aforementioned studies on two different groups of HFA children (Janke and Perovic, 2015, 2016), both of whom gave object choices uniformly, too. Three studies culminating in the same pattern of results strongly support our argument that this example of syntax is unimpaired in HFA.…”

“…A two-choice picture-selection task in Janke (2016) and Janke and Perovic (2016) was employed. Four examples of control were included in the test battery but this report focuses on three: complement control, temporal adjunct control and controlled verbal gerund subjects 3 .…”

“…There are mixed results in the literature as to whether children with ASD are fully proficient at this level of grammar. In the first two studies on this construction in autism, Janke and Perovic (2015) and Janke and Perovic (2016) showed that regular complement control caused no interpretative difficulties in two different populations of high-functioning children with autism (HFA). However, other examples of complex syntax may be compromised in this sub-group.…”

“…Janke and Perovic (2016) tested a group of HFA children on controlled VGSs and found that the children showed a similar level of susceptibility to the pragmatic leads as their control children. This is in contrast to the widely established view that all pragmatics in ASD is deficient: their results suggest that pragmatic skills relevant to the selective and appropriate use of context to decide who is being spoken about in undetermined circumstances are functioning well in this population.…”