Abstract
Nine low-functioning children with profound expressive language impairment and autism were studied in terms of their responsiveness to a computer-based learning program designed to assess syntactic awareness. The children learned to touch words on a screen in the correct sequence in order to see a corresponding animation, such as ‘monkey flies’. The game progressed in levels from 2 to 4 word sequences, contingent upon success at each stage. Although performance was highly variable across participants, a detailed review of their learning profiles suggested that no child lacked syntactic awareness and that elementary syntactic control in a non-speech domain was superior to that manifest in their spoken language. The reasons for production failures at the level of speech in children with autism are discussed.
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Notes
It is recognised that this term can sometimes refer to severe symptomatology rather than IQ.
Programming carried out by Karl Monsen.
Macromedia was recently acquired by Adobe. However, version 5 was released under the name Macromedia.
Note that, for this reason, the lines plotted don’t always appear to denote a terminal performance at each level of 8/10.
Prior to this, differences in RT sequences between similar levels were compared for each participant individually. No participant showed consistent RT differences between pairs of similar levels, supporting the combination of data across levels.
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Acknowledgments
The first author would like to gratefully acknowledge support from the British Academy through small project grants R39501, J29417 enabling construction and development of the core Eventaurs programme by Graham Sortino (programmer) and Stephen Elphick (animations), together with grant RA0558 that enabled the project described here. She would also like to thank Professor Uta Frith for her support and enthusiasm for the project at its inception. Finally, many thanks are due to the patience and co-operation of the children who participated in the project and that of their parents and families.
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McGonigle-Chalmers, M., Alderson-Day, B., Fleming, J. et al. Profound Expressive Language Impairment in Low Functioning Children with Autism: An Investigation of Syntactic Awareness Using a Computerised Learning Task. J Autism Dev Disord 43, 2062–2081 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-012-1753-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-012-1753-z