This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. A psychometric, observational, and interview study will be undertaken with 45 children all with nonverbal IQs of 75+. The children will comprise three groups; one group of children with autism spectrum disorders and language ages from four to eight years, compared to two control groups of typically developing children. One control group will consist of children with language ages from four to eight years and one control group will consist of children with non-verbal IQ's within the same range achieved in the autism spectrum disorder group. The purpose of this study is to examine the syntax comprehension and production of the participant groups. It is hypothesized that the difference in syntactic performance between known and unknown contexts by children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) will not be the same as the control groups. The children will participate in point-to-picture tasks to indicate understanding of active and passive voice sentences relating probable, neutral, or improbable events. The events in the pictures will vary from standardized to individualized well-known contexts to elicit the effect of world knowledge on syntactic understanding. The children will also participate in two spontaneous language samples; one centered on a child-preferred context and one on a clinician presented event. They will participate in two story-retelling tasks, one with a child preferred book and one with a clinician presented book. We will examine the effect of world knowledge in the differing contexts on the children's syntactic performance in the spontaneous language samples and the story-retelling samples. Error patterns on the point-to-picture tasks of active and passive sentences relating probable, improbable, or neutral events will be examined as evidence of a progression in sentence comprehension strategies. Additionally, the ASD group's results on the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales (VABS), the Autism Diagnostic Interview (ADI), syntactic subtests on the Test of Auditory Comprehension of Language - Third Edition (TACL-3), syntactical scores from the spontaneous language sample, and the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variance (DELV-CR) will be examined for associations.
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