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To efficiently learn new words, children use constraints such as mutual exclusivity (ME) to narrow the search for potential referents. The current study investigated the use of ME in toddlers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and neurotypical (NT) peers matched on nonverbal cognition. Thirty-two toddlers with ASD and 26 NT toddlers participated in a looking-while-listening task. Images of novel and familiar objects were presented along with a novel or familiar label. Overall, toddlers with ASD showed less efficient looking toward a novel referent when a novel label was presented compared to NT toddlers, controlling for age and familiar word knowledge. However, toddlers with ASD and higher language ability demonstrated more robust use of ME than those with lower language ability.

This study investigated whether children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are sensitive to mispronunciations of familiar words and compared their sensitivity to children with typical-development. Sixty-four toddlers with ASD and 31 younger, typical controls participated in a looking-while-listening task that measured their accuracy in fixating the correct object when it was labelled with a correct pronunciation versus mispronunciation. A cognitive style that prioritizes processing local, rather than global features, as claimed by the weak central coherence theory, predicts that children with ASD should be more sensitive to mispronunciations than typical controls. The results, however, reveal no differences in the effect of mispronunciations on lexical processing between groups, even when matched for receptive language or non-verbal cognitive skills.

In typical development, listeners can use semantic content of verbs to facilitate incremental language processing--a skill that is associated with existing language skills. Studies of children with ASD have not identified an association between incremental language processing in semantically-constraining contexts and language skills, perhaps because participants were adolescents and/or children with strong language skills. This study examined incremental language processing and receptive language in young children with ASD with a range of language skills. Children showed a head start when presented with semantically-constraining verbs (e.g., "Read the book") compared to neutral verbs (e.g., "Find the book"). Children with weaker receptive language showed a smaller head start than children with stronger receptive language skills, suggesting continuity between typical development and ASD.

This study investigated whether vocabulary delays in toddlers with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) can be explained by a cognitive style that prioritizes processing of detailed, local features of input over global contextual integration--as claimed by the weak central coherence (WCC) theory. Thirty toddlers with ASD and 30 younger, cognition-matched typical controls participated in a looking-while-listening task that assessed whether perceptual or semantic similarities among named images disrupted word recognition relative to a neutral condition. Overlap of perceptual features invited local processing whereas semantic overlap invited global processing. With the possible exception of a subset of toddlers who had very low vocabulary skills, these results provide no evidence that WCC is characteristic of lexical processing in toddlers with ASD.

Author(s): Courtney E. Venker[sup.1] , Eileen Haebig[sup.2] , Jan Edwards[sup.2] , Jenny R. Saffran[sup.3] , Susan Ellis Weismer[sup.2] Author Affiliations: (1) Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1500 Highland Ave. Room [...], Lexical comprehension is commonly measured by parent report, but it may be difficult for parents of children with ASD to accurately judge their child's comprehension. We compared parent report to an eye-gaze measure of lexical comprehension in which participants observed pairs of images on a screen, along with accompanying speech that named one of the two images. Twenty-two toddlers with ASD participated. Trials were included if the target word was reported as unknown. Children spent significantly more time looking at the target after it was named than before (d = 0.66). These results provide evidence that eye-gaze measures can reveal emerging lexical knowledge in young children with ASD that may otherwise be overlooked.