Past research suggested that, due to difficulties in mentalistic reasoning, individuals with autism tend to base their moral judgments on the outcome of agents' actions rather than on agents' intentions. In a novel task, aimed at reducing the processing demands required to represent intentions and generate a judgment, autistic children were…

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) aged 11-13 (N = 16) and an IQ-matched typically developing (TD) group aged 7-12 (N = 16) completed a graded grammaticality judgment task, as well as a standardized test of cognitive function. In a departure from previous studies, the judgment task involved verb argument structure overgeneralization…

This study investigates pronoun reference and verbs with nonactive morphology in high-functioning Greek-speaking children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). It is motivated by problems with reflexive pronouns demonstrated by English-speaking children with ASD and the fact that reflexivity is also expressed via nonactive (reflexive) verbs in…

Purpose: To evaluate classification accuracy and clinical feasibility of a narrative analysis tool for identifying children with a fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD). Method: Picture-elicited narratives generated by 16 age-matched pairs of school-aged children (FASD vs. typical development [TD]) were coded for semantic elaboration and…

Decision-making is an important function that can be quantified using a two-choice prediction task. Individuals with Autistic Disorder (AD) often show highly restricted and repetitive behavior that may interfere with adaptive decision-making. We assessed whether AD adults showed repetitive behavior on the choice task that was unaffected by…