Purpose: Relative clauses present a well-known processing asymmetry between object-extracted and subject-extracted dependencies across both typical and atypical populations. The present study aimed at exploring the comprehension of object and subject relative clauses as conceptualized by the Relativized Minimality framework in autistic children…

The present study investigated the production of grammatical morphemes by Mandarin-speaking children with high functioning autism. Previous research found that a subgroup of English-speaking children with autism exhibit deficits in the use of grammatical morphemes that mark tense. In order to see whether this impairment in grammatical morphology…

It is known that individuals with Asperger syndrome (AS) may show no problems with regard to what is said (e.g., lexical content) but tend to have difficulties in how utterances are produced, i.e., they may show prosodic impairments. In the present study, we focus on the use of prosodic features to express grammatical meaning. Specifically, we…

Although children with Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) show significant variation in language skills, research on what type(s) of language profiles they demonstrate has been limited. Using growth-curve analyses, we investigated how different groups of young children with ASD show increases in the size of their lexicon, morpho-syntactic production…

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) have traditionally been considered a lifelong condition; however, a subset of people makes such significant improvements that they no longer meet diagnostic criteria for an ASD. The current study examines whether these "optimal outcome" (OO) children and adolescents continue to have subtle pragmatic…

This study compared language development in 30-month-old toddlers on the autism spectrum and 25-month-old late talking toddlers without autism. Groups were matched on overall productive vocabulary (and nonverbal cognition was controlled) in order to compare language acquisition patterns related to vocabulary composition and early…

Six autistic children, age 3-6, and 6 children with Down syndrome were followed over a period of 12-26 months. Autistic children followed the same general developmental path as the Down syndrome children in the acquisition of grammatical and lexical aspects of language. (Author/JDD)