Syntactic complexity in the comprehension ofwh-questions and relative clauses in typical language development and autism

Abstract

This study investigates effects of syntactic complexity operationalized in terms of movement, intervention, and noun phrase (NP) feature similarity in the development of Aʹ-dependencies in 4-, 6-, and 8-year-old typically developing (TD) French children and children with autism spectrum disorder. Children completed an offline comprehension task testing eight syntactic structures classified in four levels of complexity: Level 0: no movement; Level 1: movement without (configurational) intervention; Level 2: movement with intervention from an element that is maximally different or featurally “disjoint” (mismatched in both lexical NP restriction and number); and Level 3: movement with intervention from an element similar in one feature or featurally “intersecting” (matched in lexical NP restriction, mismatched in number). The results show that syntactic complexity affects TD children across the three age groups, but also indicate developmental differences between these groups. Movement affected all three groups in a similar way, but intervention effects in intersection cases were stronger in younger than in older children, with NP feature similarity affecting only 4-year-olds. Complexity effects created by the similarity in lexical restriction of an intervener thus appear to be overcome early in development, arguably thanks to other differences of this intervener (which was mismatched in number). Children with autism spectrum disorder performed less well than the TD children although they were matched on nonverbal reasoning. Overall, syntactic complexity affected their performance in a similar way as in their TD controls, but their performance correlated with nonverbal abilities rather than age, suggesting that their grammatical development does not follow the smooth relation to age that is found in TD children.

The comprehension of passives in Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…Future work is necessary to understand if there is a relationship between syntactic dependencies such as passives and working memory in ASD, and if so, which underlying component of working memory would be involved. Finally, the development of passives did not seem to clearly improve with age in ASD as in TD, suggesting that this delay may persist into adolescence and even adulthood, as has been reported for other studies of complex syntax in ASD (Riches et al 2010;Durrleman et al 2015).…”

“…Interestingly, the error trends reported above were observed in both the ASD-LN and ASD-LI groups, with a larger number of "Theta-role reversal" and "Observer substitutes Agent" errors found for the children with language impairment. All these incorrect responses are plausibly the result of children's difficulty with locality constraints on chain formation (Borer & Wexler 1992;Hyams & Snyder 2005Snyder & Hyams 2015), part of a more general difficulty observed in children with ASD, which echoes what is found in young TD children, for the acquisition of structures involving noncanonical word orders (Riches et al 2010;Terzi et al 2012;Durrleman et al 2015;Durrleman & Delage 2016). While comprehension rates on more complex passive structures improves smoothly in relation to age in TD children, this was not the case for children with ASD, a situation already reported for other noncanonical structures in this population (Durrleman et al 2015).…”

“…Various structures involving noncanonical word orders, such as accusative clitics (1), object relative clauses (2) and object wh-questions (3), have all been found to be affected even in higher-functioning individuals on the spectrum (Riches et al 2010;Terzi et al 2012;Prévost et al, 2017;Durrleman et al 2015;Durrleman & Delage 2016).…”

“…To sum up, subsets of children on the autistic spectrum have been found to present linguistic profiles reminiscent of SLI, including difficulties with verbal working memory (Kjelgaard & Tager-Flusberg 2001) and complex noncanonical constructions Durrleman et al 2015;Durrleman & Delage 2016;. However, the studies on one such construction in ASD, namely passives, are sparse and remain inconclusive due to small sample sizes and conflicting reports.…”

C-Command in the Grammars of Children with High Functioning Autism

“…More recently, there have been investigations into the comprehension of complex syntactic structures such as wh -questions (Zebib et al, 2013), relative clauses (Riches et al, 2010; Durrleman and Zufferey, 2013; Durrleman et al, 2015), raising and passives (Perovic et al, 2007). Durrleman et al (2016) assessed the comprehension of both relative clauses and wh -questions in French and showed that children with ASD had lower performance even on simple structures as compared with their typically-developing (TD) peers who were matched on non-verbal abilities 4 . Riches et al (2010) showed that English-speaking teenagers diagnosed with autism and concomitant language deficits made significantly more errors than their age matched TD counterparts on subject and object relative clauses when tested on a sentence repetition task.…”