Is Language Impairment in Autism Unique?
While individuals with autism and those with syntactic developmental language impairment score similarly on language tests, their specific error types and underlying cognitive deficits are fundamentally different.
Source
ASD Is Not DLI: Individuals With Autism and Individuals With Syntactic DLI Show Similar Performance Level in Syntactic Tasks, but Different Error Patterns
What they did
Researchers compared 18 Hebrew-speaking youth with autism to peers with syntactic developmental language impairment and typically developing controls across three language tasks. These assessments measured the participants' ability to construct relative clauses from picture cues, read and paraphrase sentences with homographs, and repeat sentences of different grammatical structures.
What they found
The group with autism made numerous pragmatic mistakes, such as providing off-topic responses or descriptions unrelated to the experimenter's questions, whereas the language-impaired group only made grammatical errors. Additionally, while the language-impaired group showed a selective difficulty with object relative clauses, the group with autism struggled across all sentence formats, including basic sentences without complex grammar. The youth with autism also frequently failed to correctly read homographs in simple contexts, whereas the language-impaired group only struggled with them in complex sentences.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The study cannot prove a causal mechanism for why the participants with autism struggle with these language tasks, as the design is purely observational and comparative. It also does not represent the full, highly diverse autism spectrum, as the sample of youth with autism was small and did not include individuals classified as low-functioning with low intelligence scores. Finally, because the syntactic language-impaired comparison groups were drawn from different historical datasets rather than being tested simultaneously alongside the group with autism, subtle differences in testing environments cannot be completely ruled out.
Key terms
- Syntactic Developmental Language Impairment (SyDLI)
- A specific type of language impairment where an individual's syntactic abilities are selectively affected, while other language domains remain intact.
- Wh-movement
- A grammatical process in which a word or phrase is moved from its original position to the front of a sentence, such as in questions or relative clauses.
- Subject Relative Clause
- A complex sentence structure where the relative clause modifies the subject of the sentence.
- Object Relative Clause
- A complex sentence structure where the relative clause modifies the object of the sentence, typically requiring more cognitive processing because word order is changed.
- Heterophonic Homographs
- Words that share the same spelling but have different pronunciations and meanings depending on the syntactic context in which they are used.
- Pragmatic Error
- A communication mistake where the speaker's response is socially or contextually inappropriate, even if the grammar itself is correct.
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Quiz yourself
What was the primary objective of this study regarding children with ASD and SyDLI?
Common questions
Why does this study argue that language difficulties in autism are different from typical language impairments?
The study shows that while both groups score similarly overall, children with autism make 'pragmatic' errors (like off-topic comments) and struggle with all sentence types, whereas children with developmental language impairments make strictly grammatical errors and struggle specifically with complex sentences.
What are relative clauses and why were they used in this research?
Relative clauses are clauses starting with words like 'who' or 'that' that modify nouns. They are excellent test cases because producing and understanding them requires complex grammatical movement, which is a known difficulty for individuals with syntactic language impairments.
Did the participants with autism have trouble with basic, simple sentences?
Yes. Unlike the language-impaired group, who performed perfectly on simple sentences and only struggled with complex grammar, the participants with autism made mistakes on basic sentences as well, suggesting their difficulty is not purely syntactic in nature.
What role did reading play in this study?
Participants had to read sentences containing words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently depending on context. Children with language impairment only misread these words when they appeared in complex sentences, while children with autism struggled to read them correctly in both simple and complex sentences.
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