Naming of artifacts and word learning in children with autism

Background: children with typical development use functional, intentional and shape cues in object naming and word learning tasks (Diesendruck, Markson & Bloom, 2003; Gelman & Ebeling, 1998). Objectives: the aim of this study was to investigate such ability in children with autism. Methods: in experiment 1, 29 children with autism and a group of children with typical development were shown line drawings of objects and they were told that these objects were the product of either a deliberate action or a fortuitous event. Children were then asked to say what the objects were. Responses were classified as shape based (“a man”) or substance based (“a spot of paint”). In experiment 2, 36 children with autism were shown triplets of novel objects consisting always of a ‘target' object named using a novel noun (“millo”), another object with a similar overall shape and a third object with a different shape that was either (1) given no description or (2) described as bearing a functional similarity with the target object because of its potential use or its function as intended by its creator. Results: in experiment 1, children with typical development preferred shape responses on intentional trials and substance responses on accidental trials. By contrast, children with autism did not differentiate their responses in the two types of trials. In experiment 2, when asked to find another “millo”, the presence of functional information increased the frequency of all children's functional match choices. However, the responses of children with autism were not affected by whether the object function was described as the intended function, rather than a merely possible one. Conclusions: these findings suggest that children with autism have difficulties in taking into account information about intentions when naming and reasoning about artifacts. We compare domain specific and domain general accounts for these findings.