Palm reversal errors in native-signing children with autism

Abstract

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who have native exposure to a sign language such as American Sign Language (ASL) have received almost no scientific attention. This paper reports the first studies on a sample of five native-signing children (four deaf children of deaf parents and one hearing child of deaf parents; ages 4;6 to 7;5) diagnosed with ASD. A domain-general deficit in the ability of children with ASD to replicate the gestures of others is hypothesized to be a source of palm orientation reversal errors in sign. In Study 1, naturalistic language samples were collected from three native-signing children with ASD and were analyzed for errors in handshape, location, movement and palm orientation. In Study 2, four native-signing children with ASD were compared to 12 typically-developing deaf children (ages 3;7 to 6;9, all born to deaf parents) on a fingerspelling task. In both studies children with ASD showed a tendency to reverse palm orientation on signs specified for inward/outward orientation. Typically-developing deaf children did not produce any such errors in palm orientation. We conclude that this kind of palm reversal has a perceptual rather than a motoric source, and is further evidence of a “self-other mapping” deficit in ASD.

The Use of Sign Language Pronouns by Native-Signing Children with Autism

“…In other words, children with ASD sometimes imitate gestures as they appear from their own perspective , leading to the reversed palm in the example of a wave gesture described above. Building on this work, we have shown that native-signing children with ASD also produce similar palm reversal errors in their productions of sign language (Shield & Meier, 2012). …”

Relations between language and cognition in native‐signing children with autism spectrum disorder

“…For children with ASD acquiring sign, VPT difficulties may result not only in language comprehension problems (as tested in this study), but also in unique production errors: native‐signing children with ASD have been shown to reverse the direction of their palm while signing, such that their sign production more closely matches what they see when another person generates that sign rather than how the sign is typically produced, an error pattern that is suggestive of a VPT deficit [Shield & Meier, ]. Thus, while impaired VPT abilities appear to be characteristic of ASD, the linguistic manifestations of such a deficit may be different for signed versus spoken languages.…”

The integrity of lexical acquisition mechanisms in autism spectrum disorders: A research review

“…An important finding from this research is that although native signers with ASD do not reverse pronouns in the same way as children with ASD who use spoken language [Shield, ], they do use sign language pronouns less often than TD deaf children, even though sign pronouns are semantically transparent in that they point in the direction of their referent [Shield et al, ]. They further show unique patterns of sign formation, such as reversal of the palm while signing [Shield & Meier, ], which suggest a different approach to gesture imitation and sign learning. Although there is no obvious analog to palm reversal in speech, the authors hypothesize that “the same underlying deficit (in the understanding of the relationship between self and other) results in two different modality‐dependent linguistic phenomena: pronoun reversals in speech, and reversals of the palm in sign” [Shield et al, , p. 2141].…”