Toddlers with Autism Spectrum Disorder Can Use Language to Update Their Expectations About the World

Abstract

This study examined if two-year-olds with ASD can update mental representations on the basis of verbal input. In an eye-tracking study, toddlers with ASD and typically-developing nonverbal age-matched controls were exposed to visual or verbal information about a change in a recently encoded scene, followed by an outcome that was either congruent or incongruent with that information. Findings revealed that both groups looked longer at incongruent outcomes, regardless of information modality, and despite the fact that toddlers with ASD had significantly lower measured verbal abilities than TD toddlers. This demonstrates that, although there is heterogeneity on the individual level, young toddlers with ASD can succeed in updating their mental representations on the basis of verbal input in a low-demand task.

Lexical Development in Young Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD): How ASD May Affect Intake From the Input

“…There are also positive findings of abilities to engage in statistical learning and other kinds of implicit learning from ambient linguistic streams (e.g., Eigsti & Mayo, 2011;Foti, De Crescenzo, Vivanti, Menghini, & Vicari, 2015;Mayo & Eigsti, 2012;Obeid, Brooks, Powers, Gillespie-Lynch, & Lum, 2016). Further, children with ASD are able to use linguistic information describing an object's change of location in the absence of visual access to that object to make inferences about its new location (Fitch, Valadez, Ganea, Carter, & Kaldy, 2018), suggesting that they can attend and learn from language presented in the absence of visual referents.…”