Investigating Morphosyntactic Patterns and Phonological Memory in Children With ASD and DLD

This study explored the morphosyntactic characteristics of Hebrew-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and developmental language disorder (DLD) as well as the associations between morphosyntactic skills and phonological memory.

Eighty Hebrew-speaking preschool children aged 5-to-6 years were assessed. All participants had nonverbal intelligence within average range IQ > 85. Language abilities were assessed using the Hebrew Goralnik test, which evaluates naming, articulation, comprehension, sentence imitation, expressive language, and storytelling skills. Morphosyntactic skills were assessed using the Katzenberger Hebrew Language Assessment test (KHLA). This test assessed the following language skills: (a) inflecting verbs for the past and future tense; (b) using the same verb in two verb-derivation patterns; (c) inflecting plural forms with changing stems and/or irregular suffixes; (d) deriving singular forms from nouns with irregular plural suffixes; (e) inflecting the plural adjectives of irregular inflected nouns; and (f) deriving consequential adjectives from a verb. In addition, phonological memory for nonsense words and syllables was assessed using the Shatil test.

Typically developing (TD) children achieved the highest KHLA and Shatil scores. One-way ANCOVAs controlling for nonverbal intelligence revealed significant group differences. Pairwise comparisons demonstrated that TD outperformed ASD-Language- normal (ASD-LN), ASD-Language-Impaired (ASD-LI), and DLD on the KHLA and phonological memory tasks. Associations were found between KHLA and Shatil scores in ASD-LI and DLD, suggesting that morphosyntactic skills are linked to phonological memory in these groups. Hierarchical regression analysis across all groups (n = 80) revealed that phonological memory contributes an additional 11% to the variance of morphosyntactic skills (KHLA) beyond the effects of language abilities.

These results highlight differences in morphosyntactic skills among subgroups of children with TD, ASD-LN, ASD-LI, and DLD that are associated with difficulties in phonological memory, especially in children with ASD-LI and DLD.