Production of referring expressions by children with ASD: Effects of referent accessibility and working memory capacity

Stegenwallner-Schütz, Maja; Adani, Flavia

doi:10.1080/10489223.2020.1769625

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…These authors also established that working memory capacity significantly predicts the likelihood of producing competing-referents ambiguity in both groups, again suggesting that competing-referents ambiguity is associated with executive functioning. Therefore, the fact that this study and the studies of Kuijper et al (2015) and Stegenwallner-Schütz and Adani (2020) all found that this type of ambiguity was not particularly prevalent in autistic narratives calls into question whether executive functioning differences can explain increased referential ambiguity in autistic narratives.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 51%

“…However, these authors, like us, did not find more frequent uses of competing-referents ambiguity by autistic participants compared to NA participants. More recently, Stegenwallner-Schütz and Adani (2020) used a picture description task to probe for competing-referents ambiguity, specifically, and also found that autistic children were not more likely to produce competing-referents ambiguity than NA children. These authors also established that working memory capacity significantly predicts the likelihood of producing competing-referents ambiguity in both groups, again suggesting that competing-referents ambiguity is associated with executive functioning.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Analysis of Noun Phrase Ambiguity in Narratives Reveals Differences in Referential Establishment But Not Cohesion for Older Autistic Children

Zane

Grossman

2023

J Speech Lang Hear Res

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Purpose: Stories told by autistic narrators often contain relatively frequent use of ambiguous references. However, it remains unclear whether this ambiguity is driven by ambiguous character establishment (e.g., “Once upon a time, she/the girl…”) and/or ambiguous cohesion (e.g., “Two girls lived in a castle. She/The girl…”). In this study, we directly compared rates of each type of ambiguity within and between narratives told by autistic and non-autistic children, to determine which type of ambiguity is relatively more common in narratives told by autistic children. Method: Thirty-three 10- to 17-year-old autistic participants ( n = 17) and non-autistic peers ( n = 16), who were not statistically different in age, standardized language scores, and IQ scores ( p > .8 for all), watched two short animated videos alone and then described the videos' events to two listeners who were openly unfamiliar with the videos. We transcribed video recordings of narratives and coded all referential noun phrases (NPs) as either clear or ambiguous. We further categorized ambiguous NPs as either ineffective introduction or ineffective cohesion. Results: Autistic children produced significantly higher rates of ambiguous establishment than non-autistic peers, whereas between-group comparisons' rates of ambiguous cohesion were not statistically significant. Conclusions: Older children on the autism spectrum show differences in the way they introduce characters, selecting NP types that are only appropriate when their listener is already familiar with the referent. In contrast, once they have introduced characters, they show cohesive skills that are comparable to those of non-autistic peers. Findings support theories arguing that autistic children show differences in their application of social pragmatic principles (listener/context-specific pragmatic rules), whereas their use of linguistic pragmatics (context-independent rules) is similar to that of non-autistic peers.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 51%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analysis of Noun Phrase Ambiguity in Narratives Reveals Differences in Referential Establishment But Not Cohesion for Older Autistic Children

Zane

Grossman

2023

J Speech Lang Hear Res

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“…Autistic individuals have been shown to have difficulty using pronouns appropriately in the specific context, including first and second person pronouns, i.e. I, me, you , leading to cases of pronoun reversal (Naigles et al 2016 ; Overweg et al 2018 ), and using nonambiguous and adequately informative referential expressions (Novogrodsky and Edelson 2016 ; but see Stegenwallner-Schütz and Adani 2020 ). In null-subject languages such as Italian and Greek (Mazzaggio and Shield 2020 ; Terzi et al 2019 ), instead of using ambiguous pronouns, autistic children tend to avoid pronouns in favor of nouns or names.…”

Section: Language Profiles In Asdmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language in autism: domains, profiles and co-occurring conditions

et al. 2023

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This article reviews the current knowledge state on pragmatic and structural language abilities in autism and their potential relation to extralinguistic abilities and autistic traits. The focus is on questions regarding autism language profiles with varying degrees of (selective) impairment and with respect to potential comorbidity of autism and language impairment: Is language impairment in autism the co-occurrence of two distinct conditions (comorbidity), a consequence of autism itself (no comorbidity), or one possible combination from a series of neurodevelopmental properties (dimensional approach)? As for language profiles in autism, three main groups are identified, namely, (i) verbal autistic individuals without structural language impairment, (ii) verbal autistic individuals with structural language impairment, and (iii) minimally verbal autistic individuals. However, this tripartite distinction hides enormous linguistic heterogeneity. Regarding the nature of language impairment in autism, there is currently no model of how language difficulties may interact with autism characteristics and with various extralinguistic cognitive abilities. Building such a model requires carefully designed explorations that address specific aspects of language and extralinguistic cognition. This should lead to a fundamental increase in our understanding of language impairment in autism, thereby paving the way for a substantial contribution to the question of how to best characterize neurodevelopmental disorders.

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Referential expressions in monolingual and bilingual children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD): A study of informativeness and definiteness

Meir

Novogrodsky

2021

J. Child Lang.

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The current study evaluated the separate and combined effects of bilingualism and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) on informativeness and definiteness marking of referential expressions. Hebrew-speaking monolingual children (21 with ASD and 28 with typical language development) and Russian–Hebrew-speaking bilingual children (13 with ASD and 30 with typical language development) aged 4–9 years participated. Informativeness, indexed by referential contrasts, was affected by ASD, but not by bilingualism. Definiteness use was non-target-like in children with ASD and in bilingual children, and it was mainly predicted by children’s morpho-syntactic abilities in Hebrew. Language-universal and language-specific properties of referential use are discussed.

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Production of referring expressions by children with ASD: Effects of referent accessibility and working memory capacity

Cited by 3 publications

References 54 publications

Analysis of Noun Phrase Ambiguity in Narratives Reveals Differences in Referential Establishment But Not Cohesion for Older Autistic Children

Analysis of Noun Phrase Ambiguity in Narratives Reveals Differences in Referential Establishment But Not Cohesion for Older Autistic Children

Language in autism: domains, profiles and co-occurring conditions

Referential expressions in monolingual and bilingual children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD): A study of informativeness and definiteness

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