Competence Sintatic-Semantic Ambiguity Test in Children with Autism and Specific Language Impairment

Background: Autism characterizes for prejudice on social interaction; restricted and stereotyped repertory of interests and accentuated difficulty of verbal and nonverbal communication. As for the Specific Language Impairment, it is eminently determined based on exclusion criteria (lack of hearing impairment, cognitive disability and in the motor development of speech, neurological injuries and/or socio-emotional disorders), for low performance in formal tests and standardized receptive and expressive language. Although it is possible to observe changes in the jurisdiction of language in both conditions, we hypothesize that the degree of severity is higher in children with Autism, especially in the analysis of non-literal information and of ambiguous content. 

Objectives: Therefore, the objective of this study was to analyze and compare the syntactic-semantic competence in evidence of ambiguity of children with Autism and with Specific Language Impairment.

Methods:  This is a case-control study. The sample was composed of 20 children, in the age group of 6 to 12 years, of both sexes, diagnosed and treated in the Speech Therapy Research Laboratory from the Department of Speech Language and Hearing at UNIFESP and divided in two groups: Autism Group (AU Group) composed by 10 boys with multidisciplinary diagnosis of Autism and Specific Language Impairment Group (SLI Group) composed by 5 boys and 5 girls.

            All children were regularly enrolled in public schools on elementary school and presented results of audiological and neurological evaluations within parameters of normality. The psychological evaluation indicated for SLI Group an average of intellectual quotient in the band and for the AU Group, average low.

            We utilized the subtest Ambiguous Sentences of the Test of Language Competence – TLC (Wiig, Secord, 1989). For the analysis of the results were compared the scores of the children in both groups, according to the total number of correct answers. We used the Mann-Whitney nonparametric test with a significance level of 0.05.

Results:  There was a significant difference, with the best performance of the SLI Group in comparison with the AU Group (p=0.010).

Conclusions:  Although both groups have shown deficits in competence syntactic-semantic, the degree of severity found in the AU group was greater, proving that the language impairments in autistic children are more pronounced and of greater complexity.