Brief Report: Children on the Autism Spectrum are Challenged by Complex Word Meanings.
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| Title: | Brief Report: Children on the Autism Spectrum are Challenged by Complex Word Meanings. |
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| Authors: | Floyd, Sammy, Jeppsen, Charlotte, Goldberg, Adele E. |
| Source: | Journal of Autism & Developmental Disorders. Jul2021, Vol. 51 Issue 7, p2543-2549. 7p. 2 Color Photographs, 1 Graph. |
| Subjects: | Autism, Affinity groups, Learning, Neural development, Vocabulary, Terms & phrases, Children |
| Abstract: | The current work suggests that two factors conspire to make vocabulary learning challenging for youth on the Autism spectrum: (1) a tendency to focus on specifics rather than on relationships among entities and (2) the fact that most words are associated with distinct but related meanings (e.g. baseball cap, pen cap, bottle cap). Neurotypical (NT) children find it easier to learn multiple related meanings of words (polysemy) in comparison to multiple unrelated meanings (homonymy). We exposed 60 NT children and 40 verbal youth on the Autism spectrum to novel words. The groups' performance learning homonyms was comparable, but unlike their NT peers, youth on the spectrum did not display the same advantage for learning polysemous words compared to homonyms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
| Copyright of Journal of Autism & Developmental Disorders is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.) | |
| Database: | Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection |
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| Abstract: | The current work suggests that two factors conspire to make vocabulary learning challenging for youth on the Autism spectrum: (1) a tendency to focus on specifics rather than on relationships among entities and (2) the fact that most words are associated with distinct but related meanings (e.g. baseball cap, pen cap, bottle cap). Neurotypical (NT) children find it easier to learn multiple related meanings of words (polysemy) in comparison to multiple unrelated meanings (homonymy). We exposed 60 NT children and 40 verbal youth on the Autism spectrum to novel words. The groups' performance learning homonyms was comparable, but unlike their NT peers, youth on the spectrum did not display the same advantage for learning polysemous words compared to homonyms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
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| ISSN: | 01623257 |
| DOI: | 10.1007/s10803-020-04687-x |
