Sentence repetition in children with autism spectrum disorder in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

This study investigated the morphosyntactic abilities of Saudi Arabic-speaking children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) using a Saudi Arabic Sentence Repetition Task (Saudi-SRT) developed for this study. The first objective of the study was to determine whether Saudi Arabic-speaking children with autism living in Saudi have difficulties in morphosyntax as a function of their verbal abilities. For this reason, the participating children with autism were divided into subgroups of children with autism with normal language (ALN) and children with autism with language impairment (ALI) based on their verbal abilities. The second objective of this study was to identify whether the children’s performance differs as a function of the scoring scheme used. Towards that aim, two scoring schemes were used based on whether children repeated sentences verbatim versus whether they used the targeted structure accurately. The third objective was to address differences between the structures used in the Saudi-SRT. The study involved 62 five- to seven-year-old children who speak Saudi Arabic as their first language: 20 children with autism (n = 10 ALN and n = 10 ALI) and 42 typically developing (TD) control children. The children with autism showed difficulties in morphosyntax as a function of their verbal abilities, but the scoring scheme modulated this. In nonverbal abilities and receptive vocabulary, ALI scored lower than TD and ALN, and there was no difference between TD and ALN. As for the grammatical abilities, the less sensitive verbatim scheme showed a similar pattern in the ALN and ALI children who performed less well than the TD children; in contrast, the more sensitive structural scheme showed that in the most syntactically complex structures, the ALN children performed similarly to the TD children and better than the ALI children.

Sentence production and sentence repetition in autistic adolescents and young adults: Linguistic sensitivity to finiteness-marking

“…Some studies found lower scores in ASD using just sentence repetition: (a) raw scores on a Danish translation of the CELF-Preschool, 2 nd Ed. (ages 4-6) (Brynskov et al, 2017; Wiig et al, 2004), (b) raw scores on the Hebrew PETEL Test (ages 9-18) (Friedmann, 2000; Sukenik & Friedmann, 2018), and (c) percent accuracy on the Saudi Sentence Repetition Task (ages 5-7) (Alhassan & Marinis, 2021). In turn, scaled scores were lower in ASD (ages 7-17) on the English CELF-Revised Formulated Sentences (Landa & Goldberg, 2005; Semel et al, 1987).…”

“…Studies comparing ALI and ASD showed similar variation. ALI had lower percent accuracy on the Saudi Sentence Repetition Task (ages 5-7; Hedges’ g = 1.53) (Alhassan & Marinis, 2021) and the LITMUS-French Sentence Repetition (ages 18-56; r = −0.784) (Manenti et al, 2023; Prevost et al, 2012). Some studies provided only frequencies suggesting lower performance in ALI: average raw score on the English CELF-4 Recalling Sentences and Formulated Sentences ( M age = 11.0) (McGregor et al, 2012; Semel et al, 2003) and percent accuracy on the LITMUS-French Sentence Repetition (ages 6-12) (Prevost et al, 2012; Silleresi et al, 2020).…”

Language in autism: domains, profiles and co-occurring conditions

“…A bulk of work investigating morphosyntax (which refers to the ordinary usage of the word grammar– syntax and the morphological properties of words related to their position in a sentence) in autistic children has brought forth evidence showing that some children show intact performance on par with their neurotypical peers, while other autistic children present difficulties comprehending and producing a variety of morphosyntactic structures (e.g., Al-Hasan and Marinis 2021 ; Arutiunian et al 2021 ; Durrleman and Delage 2016 ; Kjelgaard and Tager-Flusberg 2001 ; Meir and Novogrodsky 2020 ; Modyanova et al 2017 ; Perovic et al 2013 ; Riches et al 2010 ; Schaeffer 2018 , 2021 ; Silleresi et al 2020 ; Tager-Flusberg 2006 ; Terzi et al 2014 ; Williams et al 2013a , b ). Affected morphosyntactic structures are those, notably, whose computation has been argued to be complex in that it entails syntactic dependencies called syntactic movement in which a constituent is pronounced in a different position from that in which it is interpreted (e.g., Which child did the mother hug?…”