While many individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience difficulties with language processing, non-linguistic semantic processing may be intact. We examined neural responses to an implicit semantic priming task by comparing N400 responses--an event-related potential related to semantic processing--in response to semantically related…

Children with autism spectrum disorders have been reported to be less influenced by a speaker's face during speech perception than those with typically development. To more closely examine these reported differences, a novel visual phonemic restoration paradigm was used to assess neural signatures (event-related potentials [ERPs]) of audiovisual…

We examined semantic processing in ASD children by presenting sentences with congruent or incongruent final words and visual narratives with congruent or incongruent final panels. An N400 effect to incongruent words appeared as compared to congruent ones, which was attenuated for the ASD children. We observed a negativity sustained to incongruous…

Purpose: Investigations into the nature of communication disorders in autistic individuals increasingly evaluate neural responses to speech stimuli. This integrative review aimed to consolidate the available data related to speech and language processing across levels of stimulus complexity (from single speech sounds to sentences) and to relate it…

Altered structural connectivity has been identified as a possible biomarker of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) risk in the developing brain. Core features of ASD include impaired social communication and early language delay. Thus, examining white matter tracts associated with language may lend further insight into early signs of ASD risk and the…

Purpose: This investigation was conducted to determine whether young children with autism spectrum disorders exhibited a canonical neural response to word stimuli and whether putative event-related potential (ERP) measures of word processing were correlated with a concurrent measure of receptive language. Additional exploratory analyses were used…

The present study investigated pitch processing in Mandarin-speaking children with autism using event-related potential measures. Two experiments were designed to test how acoustic, phonetic and semantic properties of the stimuli contributed to the neural responses for pitch change detection and involuntary attentional orienting. In comparison…

This dissertation will focus on the processing and learning of abstract, phrasal argument structure constructions. Chapter 1 provides the theoretical framework for abstract constructions, and illustrates the importance of such representations in speakers' linguistic knowledge. Chapter 2 reviews the evidence for meaning being associated with…

Personal pronouns, such as "I" and "you", require a speaker/listener to continuously re-map their reciprocal relation to their referent, depending on who is saying the pronoun. This process, called "deictic shifting", may underlie the incorrect production of these pronouns, or "pronoun reversals", such as referring to oneself with the pronoun…

In individuals with ASD, difficulties with language comprehension are most evident when higher-level semantic-pragmatic language processing is required, for instance when context has to be used to interpret the meaning of an utterance. Until now, it is unclear at what level of processing and for what type of context these difficulties in language…

The perception and the cerebral lateralization of spoken emotions were investigated in children and adolescents with high-functioning forms of autism (HFFA), and age-matched typically developing controls (TDC). A dichotic listening task using nonsense passages was used to investigate the recognition of four emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, and…

Background: Autism is a pervasive developmental disorder characterized by deficits in social-emotional, social-communicative, and language skills. Behavioral and neuroimaging studies have found that children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) evidence abnormalities in semantic processing, with particular difficulties in verbal comprehension.…

The current study investigated the neurobiological role of white matter in visuospatial versus linguistic processing abilities in autism using diffusion tensor imaging. We examined differences in white matter integrity between high-functioning children with autism (HFA) and typically developing controls (CTRL), in relation to the groups' response…

This review brings together evidence from a diverse field of methods for investigating sex differences in language processing. Differences are found in certain language-related deficits, such as stuttering, dyslexia, autism and schizophrenia. Common to these is that language problems may follow from, rather than cause the deficit. Large studies…

The intersection of Theory of Mind (ToM) processing and complex narrative comprehension in high functioning autism was examined by comparing cortical activation during the reading of passages that required inferences based on either intentions, emotional states, or physical causality. Right hemisphere activation was substantially greater for all…