Reduced sensitivity to context in language comprehension: A characteristic of Autism Spectrum Disorders or of poor structural language ability?

Research in Developmental Disabilities
Melanie Eberhardt, Aparna Nadig

Abstract

We present two experiments examining the universality and uniqueness of reduced context sensitivity in language processing in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), as proposed by the Weak Central Coherence account (Happé & Frith, 2006, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 36(1), 25). That is, do all children with ASD exhibit decreased context sensitivity, and is this characteristic specific to ASD versus other neurodevelopmental conditions? Experiment 1, conducted in English, was a comparison of children with ASD with normal language and their typically-developing peers on a picture selection task where interpretation of sentential context was required to identify homonyms. Contrary to the predictions of Weak Central Coherence, the ASD-normal language group exhibited no difficulty on this task. Experiment 2, conducted in German, compared children with ASD with variable language abilities, typically-developing children, and a second control group of children with Language Impairment (LI) on a sentence completion task where a context sentence had to be considered to produce the continuation of an ambiguous sentence fragment. Both ASD-variable language and LI groups exhibited reduced context sensitivity and did not differ fro...Continue Reading

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Dec 3, 2016·Autism Research : Official Journal of the International Society for Autism Research·Martina MicaiDavid Saldaña
Nov 6, 2018·Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders·Courtney E VenkerSusan Ellis Weismer
Jun 21, 2019·Scientific Reports·Motoyasu HonmaKenjiro Ono
Oct 4, 2016·Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders·Susan Ellis WeismerCourtney E Venker
Aug 3, 2021·Research in Developmental Disabilities·Vardan ArutiunianOlga Dragoy

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