The Interface of Syntax with Pragmatics and Prosody in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Terzi, Arhonto; Marinis, Theodoros; Francis, Kostantinos

doi:10.1007/s10803-016-2811-8

Cited by 59 publications

(41 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…The theory predicts that TD children (and thus children with SLI) will not omit object clitics in Greek, and that was confirmed for TD children by Tsakali and Wexler (2003) and for children with SLI by Manika et al (2011). One such study has already been done in Greek for 6-year-old children with high-functioning autism (Terzi et al, 2016), who show lower clitic production than age and receptive vocabulary matched TD controls, which indicates deviance. In this way, the studies in the field of grammar in autism will advance to the level of the study of the theory of developmental mechanisms, rather than individual constructions, paralleling advances in the study of typical development.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Grammar Is Differentially Impaired in Subgroups of Autism Spectrum Disorders: Evidence from an Investigation of Tense Marking and Morphosyntax

2017

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Deficits in the production of verbal inflection (tense marking, or finiteness) are part of the Optional Infinitive (OI) stage of typical grammatical development. They are also a hallmark of language impairment: they have been used as biomarkers in guiding genetic studies of Specific Language Impairment (SLI), and have also been observed in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). To determine the detailed nature of finiteness abilities in subgroups of ASD [autism with impaired language (ALI) vs. autism with normal language (ALN)], we compared tense marking abilities in 46 children with ALI and 37 children with ALN with that of two groups of nonverbal mental age (MA) and verbal MA-matched typically developing (TD) controls, the first such study described in the literature. Our participants' performance on two elicited production tasks, probing third-person-singular -s and past tense -ed, from the Rice/Wexler Test of Early Grammatical Impairment (TEGI, Rice and Wexler, 2001), revealed extensive deficits in the ALI group: their ability to correctly mark tense was significantly worse than their much younger TD controls', and significantly worse than that of the ALN group. In contrast, the ALN group performed similarly to their TD controls. We found good knowledge of the meaning of tense, and of case and agreement, in both ASD groups. Similarly, both ASD groups showed distributions of null or overt subjects with nonfinite and finite verbs in line with those found in young TD children. A key difference, however, was that the ALI group used (rather than simply omitted) the wrong tense in some sentences, a feature not reported in the OI stage for TD or SLI children. Our results confirm a clear distinction in the morphosyntactic abilities of the two subgroups of children with ASD: the language system responsible for finiteness in the ALN group seems to be functioning comparably to that of the TD children, whereas the ALI group, despite showing knowledge of case and agreement, seems to experience an extensive grammatical deficit with respect to finiteness which does not seem to improve with age. Crucially, our ALI group seems to have worse grammatical abilities even than those reported for SLI.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Grammar Is Differentially Impaired in Subgroups of Autism Spectrum Disorders: Evidence from an Investigation of Tense Marking and Morphosyntax

2017

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“…First, patients with aphasia experience significant difficulty understanding and/or producing language, but appear to be largely unimpaired in their ToM reasoning (e.g., Dronkers et al, 1998;Varley & Siegal, 2000;Varley, Siegal & Want, 2001;Apperly et al, 2006;Willems et al, 2011). Conversely, individuals with autism spectrum disorders suffer from ToMor more generalized socialdeficits (e.g., Baron-Cohen et al, 1985;Happé, 1993), yet often have their core linguistic processing abilities intact (e.g., Wilkinson, 1998;Lord & Paul, 1997;Tager-Flusberg, 2006;Asberg, 2010;Terzi, Marinis, & Francis, 2016;Diehl, Bennetto, Young, 2006;Janke, Perovic, 2015;Frith & Happe, 1994). And second, neuroimaging studies with healthy adults have revealed that largely distinct sets of brain regions support ToM vs. language processing abilities.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Functionally distinct language and Theory of Mind networks work together, especially during language comprehension

Paunov¹,

Blank²,

Fedorenko

2017

Preprint

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Communication requires the ability to generate and interpret linguistic signals, as well as the ability to infer the beliefs, desires, and goals of others (“Theory of Mind”, ToM). These two abilities have been shown to dissociate: on the one hand, individuals with severe aphasia retain the ability to think about others’ mental states; on the other hand, individuals with autism spectrum disorders are impaired in their social reasoning, but their basic language processing is often intact. In line with this evidence from developmental and acquired disorders, fMRI studies have shown that linguistic and ToM abilities are implemented in distinct sets of brain regions. And yet, language is fundamentally a social tool that allows us to share thoughts with one another. Thus, the language and ToM networks should work closely together in spite of being implemented in distinct neural circuits. Here, we investigated potential interactions between these networks during naturalistic cognition using the functional correlation approach in fMRI. Although inter-region correlations within each network were higher than between-network correlations across experiments, we also observed reliably above-baseline synchronization of BOLD signal fluctuations between the two networks during rest and, to an even greater extent, during story comprehension. This synchronization was functionally specific: neither network synchronized with the executive control network. Thus, coordination between the language and ToM networks appears to be an inherent characteristic of their functional architecture, and is increased during naturalistic language processing.

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“…In order to do so, we did not only assess comprehension and production of simple clitics, but also comprehension and production of clitics in CLLD structures, along with a number of other structures that forbid the use of a clitic pronoun (Terzi et al 2015). The use of clitic pronouns, by contrast to their corresponding DPs, is determined on the basis of specific pragmatic grounds, which are rather well described in the relevant literature -see Mavrogiorgos (2010) for a recent review, and the discussion later in the paper.…”

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confidence: 99%

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

Terzi¹,

Marinis

Francis³

2016

Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today

Self Cite

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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.

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The Interface of Syntax with Pragmatics and Prosody in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Cited by 59 publications

References 23 publications

Grammar Is Differentially Impaired in Subgroups of Autism Spectrum Disorders: Evidence from an Investigation of Tense Marking and Morphosyntax

Grammar Is Differentially Impaired in Subgroups of Autism Spectrum Disorders: Evidence from an Investigation of Tense Marking and Morphosyntax

Functionally distinct language and Theory of Mind networks work together, especially during language comprehension

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

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