Lexical Knowledge and Lexical Use in Autism

Abstract

One aspect of autistic language that has been infrequently researched is vocabulary and the conceptual knowledge underpinning individual words or word types. In this descriptive study we investigate anomalous vocabulary use in a 70,000-word corpus of conversational autistic language and examine evidence that concept formation, and hence vocabulary, is abnormal in autism. Particular attention is paid to the expression of artifact and temporal concepts which some believe may develop abnormally in autism. Little evidence is found of anomalous use of artifact terms, though errors with temporal (and also spatial) expressions are relatively common. We discuss why this may be and consider several potential explanations for why underlying lexical knowledge in autism may not necessarily be reflected in lexical use.

Repetetive Extralinguistic, Prosodic and Linguistic Behavior in Autism Spectrum Disorders-High Functioning (ASD-HF)

“…Repetitive language behavior has been reported in the literature (e.g. Perkins et al, 2006), but as far as we can determine there has not been a comprehensive study of questions raised by this phenomenon.…”

La pragmatique dans les troubles du spectre autistique

“…En effet, certains enfants TSA arrivent à se baser sur le regard pour coupler des formes phonologiques (la forme sonore du mot) nouvelles avec des objets, mais ils ne parviennent pas toujours à intégrer l'information sémantique (le sens du mot) au sein de leur lexique mental, c'est-à-dire à associer le mot nouvellement acquis à une signification riche et flexible, interconnectée avec celles d'autres mots [16,17]. Cette hypothèse expliquerait pourquoi on observe souvent un vocabulaire en réception anormalement bas par rapport au vocabulaire expressif chez les enfants avec TSA, ainsi que le fait que l'utilisation de mots soit généralement figée et peu productive dans l'autisme [7,18,19].…”

Language Assessment in Autism

“…The terms of psychological state (physical, emotional, of desire and cognitive) and of designation (natural and cultural entity, body parts, action, artifacts, time and space location and people's names) were counted by occurrence. According to the studies by Lee & Rescorla (2002) and Perkins et al (2006), the number of different psychological state terms was also counted, besides its total occurrence. The results have shown that, of the total assessed variables the ones with larger number of correlations were: MLU-words, verbs, GM1, MLU morphemes and proportion of interpersonal communicative acts.…”

“…Negative associations with the gestural mean may indicate one of two things: either the use of gestures is replaced by verbalization or the use of verbal utterances doesn't exclude the gestural delay that is observed even in children with better linguistic abilities. Perkins et al (2006) stated that even before the first year of life autistic children present delayed gestural communication that is a better diagnostic factor than word production or comprehension.…”

“…MLU-morphemes presented correlations on the first and third moments with artifacts and with the total of designative terms. Artifacts are words that express entities that are dependent on the human action, as clock, house or others (Perkins et al 2006) and in several cases they are expressed by words that refer to objects. These words are included in the category of nouns whose maximum score is three points (morphemes that express gender, number and degree) and are the grammatical class with higher scoring possibilities on MLU according to Araujo & Befi-Lopes (2004) criteria.…”