Predictive Language Processing in Preschool Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: An Eye-Tracking Study

Zhou, Peng; Zhan, Likan; Ma, Huimin

doi:10.1007/s10936-018-9612-5

Cited by 19 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 71 publications

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“…Studies employing this paradigm have demonstrated that individuals with ASD incrementally process verb information and make on-line predictions about the constraints of upcoming linguistic input. For example, similar proportions of anticipatory eye movements made towards a target item (e.g., hamster) upon hearing a biased verb (e.g., stroked) in comparison to a neutral verb (e.g., moved) have been reported for English speaking adolescents [23], young children [24], and Mandarin speaking children with ASD [25] in comparison to TD samples.…”

Section: Visual World Paradigmmentioning

confidence: 91%

What Can Eye Movements Tell Us about Subtle Cognitive Processing Differences in Autism?

Howard

Zhang

Benson

2019

Vision

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Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is neurodevelopmental condition principally characterised by impairments in social interaction and communication, and repetitive behaviours and interests. This article reviews the eye movement studies designed to investigate the underlying sampling or processing differences that might account for the principal characteristics of autism. Following a brief summary of a previous review chapter by one of the authors of the current paper, a detailed review of eye movement studies investigating various aspects of processing in autism over the last decade will be presented. The literature will be organised into sections covering different cognitive components, including language and social communication and interaction studies. The aim of the review will be to show how eye movement studies provide a very useful on-line processing measure, allowing us to account for observed differences in behavioural data (accuracy and reaction times). The subtle processing differences that eye movement data reveal in both language and social processing have the potential to impact in the everyday communication domain in autism.

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Section: Visual World Paradigmmentioning

confidence: 91%

What Can Eye Movements Tell Us about Subtle Cognitive Processing Differences in Autism?

Howard

Zhang

Benson

2019

Vision

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“…Unfortunately, in its design, the study used semantically restricted verbs, whose object arguments were highly predictable given the visual display context (e.g., "fasten", "stroke", "feed"), thus allowing for limited competition for the object position. Zhou, Zhan, and Ma (2018) used a similar Visual World paradigm design with a much younger group of participants with autism: 5-year-old Mandarin-speaking pre-school children with autism were matched on age with a control group, and on language skills with a control group of 4-year-old children. This study did not find significant differences between participants with autism and their age-matched controls in the time window following verb onset, except for a significantly larger difference between the verb-biased condition and the verb-neutral condition observed in the typical controls, but not in the children with autism.…”

Section: Eye-tracking Studies Of Language Processing In Autismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gaze and Motor Traces of Language Processing: Evidence from Autism Spectrum Disorders in Comparison to Typical Controls

Vulchanova

Chahboun

Galindo‐Prieto

et al. 2019

Cognitive Neuropsychology

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We investigated what strategies underlie figurative language processing in two groups of participants distinguished by the presence of a developmental deficit, highly-verbal participants with autism, and control participants without autism in two age ranges each. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder are characterised by impaired social interaction and communication. Even at the high end of the spectrum, where structural language is adequate, difficulties in comprehending non-literal aspects of language are widely attested. The exact causes of these problems are, however, still open to debate. In an interactive sentence-picture matching task participants selected the most suitable image representation of a non-literal figurative expression that matched the target meaning, while their eye-movements and hand movements were being tracked. Our results suggest that individuals with ASD have different processing patterns than typically developing peers when interpreting figurative language, even when they provide the correct answers. Both children with and without autism, and participants with autism display greater uncertainty and competition between alternatives when providing the answer, often reflected in also considering the literal interpretation of the expression against its target figurative meaning. We provide evidence that expression transparency and decomposability play a central role in figurative language processing across all groups. ARTICLE HISTORY

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“…The ASD group also had smaller effect sizes than the TD group in the latency to match measure, and they seemed less certain of the matching scene than the TD group, as displayed by their greater number of shifts of attention during the test trials. Hence, unlike the TD children who showed processing facility upon the first presentation of the test audio, these children with ASD appeared to be less efficient at SVO processing [see also Bavin & Baker, 2017;Naigles & Fein, 2017;Zhou et al, 2018;Zhou et al, 2019]. In addition, we found that when hearing the SVO audio, these children with ASD did not maintain their first look to the match for very long, instead, there was a drop-off in proportion of looking at the match and a switch of attention to the nonmatch during the first half of the test trials.…”

Section: Mandarin-exposed Preschool Children With Asd Are Less Efficimentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Additionally, recent eye‐tracking studies have reported that high‐functioning children with ASD manifested incremental semantic or syntactic processing in interpreting linguistic stimuli, but such processing was less developed for children with ASD than TD age mates [Bavin et al, ; Bavin, Prendergast, Kidd, Baker, & Dissanayake, ; Zhou, Ma, Zhan, & Ma, ; Zhou, Zhan, & Ma, ]. For instance, 5‐year‐old Mandarin‐speaking high‐functioning children with ASD appeared to use a verb's semantics to predict its upcoming object NPs, similar to TD 4‐year olds matched on MLU and verbal IQ [Zhou et al, ]. When tested with the sentence Kang1kang1 yao4 qu4 chi1/zhao3 di4‐shang4‐de3 dan4gao1 , “Kangkang is going to eat/find the cake on the floor,” both groups of children had more fixations on the target area (e.g., cake), upon hearing the “bias” verb chi1 “eat” than the “neutral” verb zhao3 “find.” Moreover, 5‐year olds with ASD exhibited these verb‐based anticipatory eye movements as efficiently and rapidly as TD 4‐year olds, that is, they were able to fixate more on the target area after the onset of the verb and before the onset of the object NP.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Online Processing of Subject–Verb–Object Order in a Diverse Sample of Mandarin‐Exposed Preschool Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Naigles

2019

Autism Research

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Grammatical comprehension remains a strength in English‐exposed young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), yet limited research has investigated how preschool children with ASD process grammatical structures in real time, in any language. Using the eye‐movement measures of Intermodal Preferential Looking, we assessed online processing of subject–verb–object (SVO) order in seventy 2‐ to 5‐year‐old children with ASD exposed to Mandarin Chinese across the spectrum, whose vocabulary production scores were dramatically delayed compared with the typical controls. With this Mandarin‐exposed sample, we tested the extent to which children with ASD require (a) highly consistent input and/or (b) good discourse/pragmatics for acquiring grammatical structures. Children viewed side‐by‐side videos depicting reversible actions (e.g., a bird pushing a horse vs. a horse pushing a bird), and heard an audio matching only one of those actions; their eyegaze to each video was coded and analyzed. Both typically developing children and children with ASD demonstrated comprehension of SVO word order, suggesting that core grammatical structures such as basic word order may be preserved in children with ASD across languages despite radical differences in language environment, social/pragmatic abilities, and neurological organization. However, children with ASD were less efficient in online sentence processing than typical children, and the efficiency of their online sentence processing was related to their standardized language assessment scores. Of note is that across both Mandarin Chinese and English, some proportion of minimally verbal children with ASD exhibited SVO comprehension despite their profoundly impaired expressive language skills. Autism Res 2019, 12: 1829–1844. © 2019 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Lay summary Grammar is a strength in the language comprehension of young English learners with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Eye‐movement data from a diverse sample of Chinese preschoolers with ASD indicated similar grammatical strength of basic word order in Chinese (e.g., to understand sentences like “The bird is pushing the horse”). Moreover, children's proficiency of sentence processing was related to their language assessment scores. Across languages, such knowledge is even spared in some minimally verbal children with ASD.

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Predictive Language Processing in Preschool Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: An Eye-Tracking Study

Cited by 19 publications

References 71 publications

What Can Eye Movements Tell Us about Subtle Cognitive Processing Differences in Autism?

What Can Eye Movements Tell Us about Subtle Cognitive Processing Differences in Autism?

Gaze and Motor Traces of Language Processing: Evidence from Autism Spectrum Disorders in Comparison to Typical Controls

Online Processing of Subject–Verb–Object Order in a Diverse Sample of Mandarin‐Exposed Preschool Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

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