Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

2-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences

Advisor

Klara Marton

Committee Members

Vicky Chondrogianni

Michelle MacRoy-Higgins

Subject Categories

Other Linguistics

Keywords

reference, autism, adjectives, informativity

Abstract

Autistic children often exhibit differences in their use of referring expressions during discourse, characterized by the production of ambiguous expressions or the tendency to provide too little or too much information. Although several studies have investigated the social communicative behavior of autistic children, fewer have examined the pragmatic aspects of reference and how these are related to their cognitive and general language abilities. Moreover, the majority of studies have focused on the production of pronominal reference in narratives, with fewer exploring contrastive reference, particularly in comprehension. The current study aims to address these questions by investigating both the comprehension and production of contrastive reference and informativeness in autistic children, aiming to enhance our understanding of their pragmatic language strengths and challenges and potentially inform improved assessment and support strategies.

A total of forty-two monolingual English-speaking children; 26 neurotypical children and 16 autistic children, between the ages of 6;0 to 9;11 years participated in two computerized comprehension and production tasks of contrastive reference. In the comprehension task, participants listened to adjectivally modified noun phrases in various contexts of informativity and selected the corresponding picture (e.g., Find the big cup). The production task required participants to name targets appearing in various contexts of informativity. Analyses focused on reaction times in the comprehension task and the informativeness of expressions in the production task.

Results provide valuable insights into the comprehension and production of contrastive reference and informativeness in autism. Specifically, to the best of our knowledge, this study represents the first investigation into the comprehension of informativeness in contrastive reference in autism. Additionally, it expands our knowledge on the production of contrastive reference and the informativeness of autistic children’s expressions. Findings revealed that autistic children outperformed in comprehension but were significantly more likely to be underinformative in conditions with a contrastive object in the visual display compared to neurotypical peers. Interestingly, in conditions without a contrastive object in the visual display, they were significantly less overinformative in production compared to neurotypical peers. The presence of semantic interference affected children’s performance in production but not comprehension, with both groups being less underinformative in its presence. Performance was also influenced mainly by age and general linguistic abilities. In the comprehension task, older children responded faster, and there was no strong evidence of an association between children’s language abilities and reaction times. In production, younger children across both groups were more likely to be underinformative, but the decrease with age was more pronounced in autistic children. Older autistic children were also more likely to be overinformative compared to neurotypical peers. Children in the neurotypical group with lower language scores were more likely to be overinformative, but autistic children with higher language scores were more likely to be overinformative than their neurotypical peers. The study discusses the comprehension and production differences in children’s performance, and the various factors that affect informativeness in contrastive reference.

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