An investigation on the comprehension of Persian passives in typical development and autism

Abstract

Autism Spectrum disorders have attracted the attention of many researchers working on communicative and pragmatic competence, but much less attention has been paid to the investigation of narrow syntax in this condition. On the other hand, in the field of acquisition, passive sentences (and related constructions) are known to be a late acquisition, and have been argued to be a case of late maturation. In this paper we report results on the comprehension of passive sentences in Persian-speaking children with typical development and with Autism Spectrum Disorders. In our findings, not all ASD children perform in the same way, rather those considered to be high-functioning perform like the typically developing, and the low-functioning have a clearly poorer performance. These results shed some light on former studies , Terzi et al. 2014, with seemingly inconsistent results due to the fact that heterogeneous populations were tested.Keywords: passives; comprehension; acquisition; Autism Spectrum Disorders; Persian. Resum. Una investigació sobre la comprensió de les passives del persa en casos de desenvolupament típic i d'autismeEls desordres d'espectre autista han interessat molts investigadors de la competència comunicativa i pragmàtica, però no s'ha parat gaire atenció a l'estudi de la sintaxi estricta d'aquesta condició. Per altra banda, en l'àmbit de l'adquisició, s'ha observat que les oracions passives (i construccions relacionades) s'adquireixen tard i s'ha proposat que són un cas de maduració tardana. En aquest * The authors would like to genuinely thank Mr. Zojaji, founder of the Autism Children Charity Foundation, for his support, and all participants for their willingness to take part in our experiment. We have greatly benefited from discussion with Fatemeh Nemati and from the suggestions of an anonymous reviewer. We also wish to thank Anna Espinal and Ester Boixadera (of the Servei d'Estadística Aplicada at the UAB) for the statistical analysis, and projects FFI2011-29440-C03-03 and 2009SGR 1079 for financial support. The experimental materials were used by courtesy of Kristine Jensen de López and Kenneth F. Drozd. The artist Justyna Kamykowska reserves the copyright of the drawings. CatJL 13, 2014Anna Gavarró; Yalda Heshmati article descrivim els resultats d'un experiment de comprensió de les oracions passives en nens parlants del persa amb desenvolupament típic i amb autisme. Les nostres investigacions mostren que no tots els nens autistes tenen el mateix comportament: mentre que els nens autistes amb elevada funcionalitat obtenen resultats similars als dels nens amb desenvolupament típic, els nens autistes amb funcionalitat baixa tenen uns resultats clarament pitjors. Aquestes dades aporten una nova perspectiva als estudis previs , Terzi et al. 2014, que mostraven resultats aparentment inconsistents a causa de l'heterogeneïtat de les poblacions analitzades.

ASD Is Not DLI: Individuals With Autism and Individuals With Syntactic DLI Show Similar Performance Level in Syntactic Tasks, but Different Error Patterns

“…Like in our current study, Durrleman et al ( 2016 ), who used a careful design of sentence structures with various syntactic properties concluded that unlike children with SyDLI, children with ASD often show an across-the-board deficit in various sentence structures, including simple sentences. Gavarró and Heshmati ( 2014 ) made a similar observation in their study of passive sentence comprehension in ASD: the ASD participants made errors not only on the passive sentences but also on active sentences.…”

“…This distinction, which was made in various studies, between ASD with language impairment and ASD with normal language (e.g., Kjelgaard and Tager-Flusberg, 2001 ; Whitehouse et al, 2008 ; McGregor et al, 2012 ; Gavarró and Heshmati, 2014 ; Modyanova et al, 2017 ; Tuller et al, 2017 ) reflects an important insight with respect to language in ASD. This is also a conclusion of various studies comparing ASD to DLI: some ASD participants show language impairment, whereas others have language performance similar to TD (see e.g., Kjelgaard and Tager-Flusberg, 2001 ).…”

“…Beyond the important finding that children with ASD make errors that other language impaired children do not, researchers noticed that the pattern of performance across different sentence types also differs. Gavarró and Heshmati ( 2014 ) tested the comprehension of passive sentences in Persian-speaking children with ASD. They found that a subgroup of the ASD (classified as low-functioning ASD) performed poorly on these structures.…”

Syntactic abilities and verbal memory in monolingual and bilingual children with High Functioning Autism (HFA)

“…Some reported that children with HFA have intact morphosyntactic abilities (Kjelgaard & Tager-Flusberg, 2001; Novogrodsky, 2013; Novogrodsky & Edelson, 2015; Roberts, Rice, & Tager–Flusberg, 2004). For example, monolingual children with HFA perform on par with age-matched peers with TLD on comprehension of reflexive and passive constructions (de López, Schroeder, & Gavarró, 2018; Gavarró & Heshmati, 2014; Terzi, Marinis, Kotsopoulou, & Francis, 2014).…”

Successful passive sentence comprehension among Danish adolescents with autism spectrum disorders

“…Studies on passive sentence comprehension have shown conflicting results in children with ASD. An early study by Perovic, Modyanova, and Wexler (2007) suggested impairment in passive comprehension, while more recent studies suggest intact comprehension (Gavarro´& Heshmati, 2014;Terzi et al, 2014), despite the fact that the participants in the more recent studies were younger than those in the earlier study (mean age 11;06 years for the Perovic et al study and mean age of 6;08 and 8;09, respectively, for the Terzi et al or Gavarro´& Heshmati study). This difference in results may relate to differences in the cognitive profiles of the participants in these studies, specifically in functioning level, 1 or relate to the different languages being acquired (so far English, Greek, or Persian).…”