Authors: Maggie McGonigleChalmers Ben AldersonDay Joanna Fleming Karl Monsen
Publish Date: 2013/01/06
Volume: 43, Issue: 9, Pages: 2062-2081
Abstract
Nine lowfunctioning children with profound expressive language impairment and autism were studied in terms of their responsiveness to a computerbased learning program designed to assess syntactic awareness The children learned to touch words on a screen in the correct sequence in order to see a corresponding animation such as ‘monkey flies’ The game progressed in levels from 2 to 4 word sequences contingent upon success at each stage Although performance was highly variable across participants a detailed review of their learning profiles suggested that no child lacked syntactic awareness and that elementary syntactic control in a nonspeech domain was superior to that manifest in their spoken language The reasons for production failures at the level of speech in children with autism are discussedThe first author would like to gratefully acknowledge support from the British Academy through small project grants R39501 J29417 enabling construction and development of the core Eventaurs programme by Graham Sortino programmer and Stephen Elphick animations together with grant RA0558 that enabled the project described here She would also like to thank Professor Uta Frith for her support and enthusiasm for the project at its inception Finally many thanks are due to the patience and cooperation of the children who participated in the project and that of their parents and families
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