engleski

An insight into spontaneous communication of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder acquiring Croatian: morphosyntactic errors

Language acquisition varies across the autism spectrum (ASD). While the core features of language have historically been described as relatively intact, the ability to appropriately use language shows constant impairments (Tager- Flusberg 2006). However, performance consistent with morphosyntactic deficits has been reported in later studies for the part of ASD population (onward: ASD+MSD) (Walenski et al. 2014). The descriptions of such deficits are based primarily (if not exclusively) on English data and list problems with morphology, namely omissions (both bound morphemes and function words) and overregularizations. Our goal was (1) to observe how ASD+MSD children acquire morphologically richer language (Croatian) by analysing their morphosyntactic errors and (2) to examine the homogeneity of language phenotype in this population. Individual therapy sessions of two Croatian speaking five- year-old ASD+MSD participants (≥1.5 SD below the mean on language tests) were recorded during a five-month period (40 sessions). Speech samples were transcribed in CLAN (MacWhinney, 2000). The errors were classified by type, part of speech, and grammatical category. Basic measures (mean length of utterance, mean length of turn, vocabulary diversity D) were calculated per sample. The results show that the participants produce 10% or 12% of erroneous tokens. Morphosyntactic errors account for the 75%. Inflection errors are most common (84% ; derivational errors 10% ; overregularizations 6%). Most inflectional errors are associated with nouns (48%), verbs (30%) and adjectives (10%), but other types of errors are also detected. Regardless of their language development level (differences: MLU, MLT, test results) errors of the two participants are comparable. Apart from a great diversity of omission errors and overregularizations Croatian data show a large number of substitutions. Substitution errors have not been previously associated with this population which corroborates the role of language typology in the description of any broken language conditions, including underresearched population of ASD+MSD children.

autism spectrum disorder ; language impairment ; mophosyntactic errors

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