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Implicit Grammatical Gender Representation in Italian Children with Autism without Intellectual/Language Disorder.
Caterina Artuso1, Carmen Belacchi2
1Department of Education, University of Genova, 16128 Genova, Italy.
Children with autism show similar grammatical gender understanding as typically developing peers. Implicit tasks reveal their use of linguistic markers for gender, with formal markers being an area of advantage.
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Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Developmental Psychology
- Neurodevelopmental Disorders
Background:
- Grammatical language development in autism often parallels that of typically developing children.
- Traditional assessments of grammar rely on explicit verbal tasks, potentially missing nuanced abilities.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate implicit grammatical gender representation in children with autism using Italian, a gendered language.
- To determine which linguistic markers (lexical-semantic, phonological, syntactic) children use to infer grammatical gender implicitly.
- To compare implicit grammatical processing in children with autism and typically developing children.
Main Methods:
- An implicit categorization task was administered to assess the use of different grammatical markers.
- Participants categorized animal images based on names varying in lexical-semantic, phonological, or syntactic cues.
- Performance was compared between children with autism and typically developing controls.
Main Results:
- Both groups showed similar patterns in marker categorization accuracy: lexical-semantic > phonological-syntactic > phonological > syntactic.
- Children with autism demonstrated an advantage in grammatical gender representation using formal/grammatical markers compared to lexical/semantic ones.
- Implicit assessment revealed nuanced linguistic representations not captured by traditional methods.
Conclusions:
- Children with autism possess implicit grammatical gender representation abilities comparable to typically developing peers.
- Formal grammatical markers may offer an advantage for grammatical gender processing in children with autism.
- Implicit tasks provide valuable insights into the linguistic capabilities of children with autism.