2018 Sat Poster 6379

Saturday, November 3, 2018 | Poster Session II, Metcalf Small | 3:15pm

Syntactic Strength of the SVO Word Order in the General Population of Mandarin-exposed Preschool Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders
Y. Su, L. Naigles

Recent comprehension studies have revealed syntactic strengths in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), often when they achieve similar vocabulary levels as those of successfully comprehending (but younger) typically developing (TD) children. For example, 3-year-old English learners with ASD utilized Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) word order to comprehend active reversible sentences, similar to vocabulary-matched 25- month-old TD children (Swensen et al., 2007); 4-5-year-old high-functioning Mandarin- speaking children with autism used SVO word order in assigning thematic roles of NPs in sentence comprehension (Zhou et al., 2017). However, no studies have investigated whether the general population of Mandarin-exposed preschool children with ASD demonstrates similar syntactic strengths.

Using Intermodal Preferential Looking (Naigles & Tovar, 2012), this study assessed the processing of SVO word order in a general group of Mandarin-exposed preschool children with ASD. Participants included 33 children with ASD and 35 TD children (Table 1). Children with ASD were significantly older and showed more autism symptoms than the TD children (ps <.001); however, their vocabulary production scores were significantly lower (p <.001). Children listened to active reversible SVO sentences (e.g., Xiaoniao zai tui xiaoma‘The bird is pushing the horse’) paired with two visual scenes, only one of which matched the sentence. A total of six familiar verbs and actions were introduced and tested for word order understanding.

Three different measures of looking behavior while viewing the videos indicated that both groups demonstrated comprehension of SVO order (Table 2, all tests 1-tailed). With the percent looking to match measure (Figure 1), group effects emerged when the test trials were divided into first-half vs. second-half [F(1,66) = 9.41, p < .01]. Children  looked significantly longer to the match during the test relative to control trials for the 1st half (TD) or 2nd half (ASD) of the test trials (ps < .05). With the latency of first look measure, the effect of scene was significant, F(1, 66) = 13.28, p < .01. Both groups  looked faster to the match than the nonmatch (ps < .05). With the number of switches measure, there were significant effects of trial, F (1, 66) = 31.29, p < .001. The number   of switches of attention decreased significantly between the control and test trials for both groups (ps < .01).

Mandarin-exposed preschool children with ASD demonstrated similar sensitivity to SVO word order as younger TD children, even though the expressive vocabulary levels  of the ASD group were dramatically delayed. Thus regardless of their verbal language skills, basic syntactic knowledge of the SVO word order may be preserved in the general population of children with ASD. Similar to the comprehension pattern with wh- questions in English-speakers with ASD (Goodwin et al., 2015), the 2nd half of the trials was a more reliable indicator of children with ASD’s comprehension. This may suggest that Mandarin-exposed children with ASD need to hear full rather than fragmentary SVO structures (i.e., without omitted nouns) to process SVO word order, i.e., certain types of input information may be more facilitative than others in the acquisition process of children with ASD.