Brief Report: Children on the Autism Spectrum are Challenged by Complex Word Meanings
- PDF / 983,006 Bytes
- 7 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 67 Downloads / 178 Views
BRIEF REPORT
Brief Report: Children on the Autism Spectrum are Challenged by Complex Word Meanings Sammy Floyd1 · Charlotte Jeppsen2 · Adele E. Goldberg1
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The current work suggests that two factors conspire to make vocabulary learning challenging for youth on the Autism spectrum: (1) a tendency to focus on specifics rather than on relationships among entities and (2) the fact that most words are associated with distinct but related meanings (e.g. baseball cap, pen cap, bottle cap). Neurotypical (NT) children find it easier to learn multiple related meanings of words (polysemy) in comparison to multiple unrelated meanings (homonymy). We exposed 60 NT children and 40 verbal youth on the Autism spectrum to novel words. The groups’ performance learning homonyms was comparable, but unlike their NT peers, youth on the spectrum did not display the same advantage for learning polysemous words compared to homonyms. Keywords Language · Communication · Linguistics · Vocabulary · Polysemy
Introduction Children on the Autism spectrum are recognized to commonly face delays and ongoing challenges in language learning (Henry et al. 2018; Kim et al. 2014). Differences related to joint attention and social skill contribute to these challenges (Kuhl et al. 2005; Mundy et al. 1990; Paul 2003), and language therapies therefore tend to focus on improving these abilities (Schreibman 2000; Paul 2003). Yet the emphasis on the impact of social skills overlooks the potential role of differential cognitive effects on language development in those with ASD (cf. Eigsti and Schuh 2016; Schuh et al. 2016; Ozonoff and McEvoy 1994). We are particularly interested in the fact that individuals on the spectrum Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-020-04687-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Sammy Floyd [email protected] * Adele E. Goldberg [email protected] 1
Psychology Department, Princeton University, South Drive, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA
2
tend to have difficulty identifying relationships among individual instances to form more general categories. For instance, Plaisted et al. (1998) demonstrated that children on the Autism spectrum were less successful than NT children at identifying new instances of a category of dot patterns, and instead tended to treat similar dot patterns as entirely novel. Relatedly, children on the Autism spectrum show a reduced ability to sort by gestalt principles (Brosnan et al. 2004), and they have been found to generalize categories more easily on the basis of rule-based strategies involving a single dimension (such as shape) than on the basis of multiple dimensions (“red and round”) (Klinger and Dawson 2001; Minshew et al. 1992; Rutherford and McIntosh 2007). Rather than attending to relationships and generalizations, chi
Data Loading...
