Semantic and syntactic characteristics of children with and without autism in mainstream schools

Abstract

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) studying in mainstream primary schools may show some difficulties in structural language in addition to pragmatic problems. Although their difficulties may not reach clinical attention, grammatical and semantic deficits have been reported. The present study investigated the language domains of morphosyntax and semantics in Cantonese-speaking children with ASD. The quantity and quality of morphosyntactic and semantic errors in the spontaneous language samples produced by 21 ASD children and 21 matched typically developing controls (TD) were compared. All the participants were from local mainstream primary schools aged from 6 to 11 years old. ADOS-2 (Lord et al., 2012) was administered and language samples were extracted for the current study. Results indicated that children in the ASD group produced significantly more semantic and morphosyntactic errors than the TD group. Children with ASD showed difficulties in expressing appropriate and precise meaning and as well produced unconventional or unacceptable utterances. They also produced significantly higher neologisms, idiosyncratic language, and pedantic language than the children in the TD control group. The current findings suggest that the semantic impairments lay in their weak lexical depth, inappropriate use of words were found in terms of their syntactic performance, and the nature of the morphosyntactic deficit was related to their possible language formulation capacity. The results were supportive of the hypothesis that ASD children tended to produce more semantic errors in terms of their rates and subtypes.