Core grammar and the language faculty in children with autism spectrum disorder
What is it about?
Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are characterized by infrequent, atypical social interaction and the presence of restricted and repetitive behaviors; many show delayed speech as well. Using the eye-movement measures of the intermodal preferential looking paradigm, this series of studies demonstrated typical patterns of comprehending core grammatical structures (e.g., word order, grammatical aspect, wh-questions) in preschool Mandarin-acquiring children with ASD, as has been reported previously in English-acquiring children with ASD. Thus, despite their apparent social deficits, core grammar is preserved in preschoolers with ASD across languages. Notably, children with ASD possess grammatical knowledge even though they may have difficulties in using such knowledge in daily conversation. We suggested that across languages, grammatical development of at least some children with ASD may be supported by their intact faculty of language - the biological endowment of the language module in our brain.
Why is it important?
Few studies have systematically explored the operation of the language faculty in autistic language acquisition, though numerous studies have underscored the involvement of the human innate capacities for language in typical language acquisition. This work provides fresh data in favor of the contribution of the language faculty in autistic language acquisition, by highlighting early grammatical knowledge in preschool children with ASD and by adopting a cross-linguistic perspective. Moreover, the findings of grammatical comprehension strengths in ASD indicate that many of them are acquiring language receptively, even when they are producing only limited speech. Note that some proportion of minimally verbal children with ASD have nonetheless hidden language understanding, unveiled via sensitive eye-movement measures.