Grammatical Aspect Is a Strength in the Language Comprehension of Young Children with Autism

Background:

Grammatical abilities of children with autism show strengths in clausal syntax; for example, children with autism understand word order before they produce it, and use sentence frames to learn about verbs (Tager-Flusberg, et al., Swensen et al.).  Less is known about their comprehension of grammatical morphemes. Some research has found that children with autism have difficulties with grammatical tense and aspect (e.g., the “-ing”/”-ed” distinction); however, these findings have relied on production data, which can be unreliable in a disorder in which children are disinclined to speak (Roberts et al.). 

Objectives:

We use intermodal preferential looking (IPL) to assess how/whether young children with autism understand tense/aspect markers.

Methods:

Children are tested every four months in this longitudinal study.  Initially, children had a mean age of 33 months, had begun intensive therapy, and had language scores comparable to 20-month-old typical children.  At Visit 5, when the children first viewed the tense/aspect videos, they averaged 49.6 months of age and produced on average 40% of the words on the CDI checklist.  Their mean age-equivalents on the scales were 32 months (Communication) and 37 months (Motor).   They also viewed the tense/aspect videos at Visit 6, when they averaged 53.9 months of age and produced on average 50% of the words on the CDI checklist.  Their mean age equivalents on the Mullen at Visit 6 were 37.3 months (Visual Reception), 35.8 months (Fine Motor), 36.3 months (Receptive Language) and 34.15 months (Expressive Language).

The tense/aspect video contrasted two familiar events, one presented as ongoing (a girl washing a dolly) and the other presented as completed (the girl finished washing the dolly).  During the control trial, both events were presented simultaneously with a non-directing audio (“She is on both screens!”). During the test trials, the audio presented the verb with the ‘-ed’ suffix (first block; e.g., “She washed the dolly”) and ‘-ing’ suffix (2^nd block; “She’s washing the dolly”).  At Visit 5, two verbs (wash, drink) were presented in each block whereas at Visit 6, four verbs (wash, drink, pick, draw) were presented in each block.  Children’s eye movements were coded off-line. Children should look longer to the matching screen during the test trials compared with the control trials.

Results:

The children looked significantly longer at the matching scenes during the test trials (60.8%) than during the control trials (50.5%) for both suffixes at both visits (Visit 5: t(10) = 2.06, p  = .03; Visit 6: t (10) = 2.08, p = .03).  Thus, they demonstrated understanding that verbs with the “–ing” suffix describe ongoing actions and verbs with “past/–ed” describe completed actions. Typically developing children show the same understanding around 30 months of age (Wagner, et al.). No correlations were found between tense/aspect understanding and standardized test performance.

Conclusions:

Young children with autism are able to contrast the aspectual nature of events based on the grammatical marker of the verb; therefore, their difficulties with producing these markers are not entirely due to a lack of knowledge.