Evidence for syntactic alignment in children with autism

Abstract

We report an experiment that examined whether children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) spontaneously converge, or align, syntactic structure with a conversational partner. Children with ASD were more likely to produce a passive structure to describe a picture after hearing their interlocutor use a passive structure to describe an unrelated picture when playing a card game. Furthermore, they converged syntactic structure with their interlocutor to the same extent as did both chronological and verbal age-matched controls. These results suggest that the linguistic impairment that is characteristic of children with ASD, and in particular their difficulty with interactive language usage, cannot be explained in terms of a general deficit in linguistic imitation.

Young Children's Comprehension of Temporal Relations in Complex Sentences: The Influence of Memory on Performance

“…Given the number of items ( N = 64), we do not believe that this feature unduly influenced our findings. However, it would be interesting in future work to test if such features could be used to support language comprehension of more difficult syntactic structures, as has been found for language production (e.g., Allen, Haywood, Rajendran, & Branigan, ).…”

Sources of variation in developmental language disorders: evidence from eye-tracking studies of sentence production

“…This should prime more syntactically complex or semantically relevant verbal descriptions of social events. There is evidence that children with specific LIs [64] and children with ASD [65] can be primed to use particular sentence structures, though it is not clear that this extends to syntactic structures that are not already spontaneously used (i.e. passive sentences).…”

Children with autism align syntax in natural conversation

“…Despite these theoretical uncertainties, recent studies suggest that ASD individuals are not atypical in the extent to which they align. Allen, Haywood, Rajendran, and Branigan (2011) showed that ASD children converge passive syntax with an interlocutor (e.g., passive phrases such as “the queen is being kissed by the sheep”) to the same extent as both chronological and verbal mental age-matched typical controls. Slocombe et al (2012) showed that adults with Asperger syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism, are as likely as typical controls to align lexis, syntax, and spatial frame of reference with an interlocutor.…”

“…A possible explanation for these contradictory findings is that the alignment observed in previous research is an experimental artifact (i.e., task dependent) rather than a real phenomenon, a possibility that has already been suggested (Healey, Purver, & Howes, 2012; Howes, Healey, & Purver, 2010). Allen et al (2011) measured alignment using an adapted version of Snap!, a card matching game for children. To play Snap!, a deck of pictorial cards is split evenly between players, who take turns in revealing their cards to each other.…”