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Sentence comprehension in autistic children

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Helen Tager-Flusberg
Helen Tager-Flusberg*
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts, Boston
*
Helen Tager-Flusberg, Psychology Department, University of Massachusetts, Boston, MA 02125
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Abstract

Comprehension and strategy use by autistic children were tested in two experiments. Eighteen autistic subjects were compared with thirty normal 3- and 4-year-olds, matched on the PPVT and Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices. In Experiment I subjects were asked to act out active and passive, biased and reversible sentences. The autistic group's overall comprehension was lower than that of the normal controls; although the autistic subjects did use a word-order strategy, they did not generally use a probable-event strategy. These findings were confirmed in Experiment II, in which the same procedure with anomalous three-word items was used. The results are interpreted as evidence that in autism there is a semantic-cognitive deficit in utilizing conceptual knowledge about relational aspects of the environment and that this deficit underlies the comprehension difficulties of autistic persons.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , February 1981 , pp. 5 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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