Syntax and its interfaces at the low and high ends of the autism spectrum

Abstract

Studies on the language abilities in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have tended to include individuals across the spectrum, with the consequence that the ensuing picture is rarely clear. Most recent studies setting apart individuals at the lower end of the autism spectrum have discovered severe problems in certain areas of grammar. Investigation of grammatical abilities at the higher end of the spectrum has not identified severe problems so far, in an interesting contrast with the lower end. Here we report on current research on pronominal object clitics and their counterpart DPs, which demonstrates that, in some syntactic environments, high-functioning children with ASD fall behind typically developing children. We claim that this behavior does not reflect problems with syntax proper, but is a consequence of pragmatic shortcomings with consequences for the syntax-pragmatics interface. Errors of substitution of clitics with their corresponding DPs are likely to be caused by difficulties in detecting prominence in the discourse. Difficulties with Focused DPs are likely to be caused by problems in distinguishing old from new information and its mapping to prosody. Future research needs to investigate pragmatics, syntax and prosody independently, in order to reach solid conclusions regarding their interaction with respect to specific phenomena in autism, which, in turn, provides an ideal condition to test the contribution of each domain to these phenomena.

Subject and Object Pronouns in High-Functioning Children With ASD of a Null-Subject Language

“…This suggests that high-functioning children with ASD have no problem with core grammar, i.e., principles of the initial state of language faculty (and presumably, along with them, the knowledge that that there are also parameters that need to be set) 4 . This conclusion is in line with earlier claims of ours (Terzi et al, 2016a,b) that high-functioning children with ASD do not have problems with syntax proper, but with the interface of syntax with pragmatics (and possibly phonology).…”

“…The participants of this study are the same as those in Terzi et al (2016a,b, 2017). The children are 20 high-functioning Greek-speaking children with ASD, aged 65–104 months (mean age: 6;11), matched on their verbal abilities on the basis of the Greek Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) (Simos et al, 2011) with 20 typically developing (TD) children, aged: 61–98 months (mean age: 6;7).…”

“…The purpose of the Terzi et al (2017) study was to compare the behavior of children with ASD in a narrative task, which elicits language samples that are very close to spontaneous language, to their behavior on a structured task they had undertaken with the same children, which elicited the production of object clitic pronouns (Terzi et al, 2016a,b). The production task revealed that the children with ASD fell behind their individually language matched TD controls on the production of object clitic pronouns and on selecting the target referent for them, but although the difference between the two groups was statistically significant, it was small (Terzi et al, 2016a,b). On the other hand, Terzi et al (2017) found that the same children with ASD did not fall behind their matched TD controls in their use of object clitic pronouns in a narrative task, in terms of associating object clitics with a felicitous antecedent.…”

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

“…Nevertheless, the findings from our English-speaking sample of children concur with the findings of English-speaking British children for binding (Janke and Perovic, 2015). These investigations all suggest that children at the high end of the spectrum may not have any kind of syntactic deficiency (e.g., Terzi et al, 2016a,b). Further cross-linguistic investigation with other complex syntactic structures will be important to shed light on this issue.…”

“…This observation suggests that children on the lower end of the autism spectrum have problems with advanced syntactic structures and serves as motivation for matching TD and ASD children in terms of non-verbal abilities. In our study, we chose to examine children on the higher end of the spectrum (see Terzi et al, 2016a,b). One question that arises is why the ALN children performed well in the second study by Perovic et al (2013b).…”