Brief report : imitation of meaningless gestures in individuals with Asperger syndrome and high-functioning autism

Nineteen people with Asperger syndrome (AS)/High-Functioning Autism (HFA) (ages 7-15) were tested on imitation of two types of meaningless gesture: hand postures and finger positions. The individuals with AS/HFA achieved lower scores in the imitation of both hand and finger positions relative to a matched neurotypical group. The between-group difference was primarily accounted for by performance on a test of visual motor integration, together with a hand imitation deficit which was specifically due to errors in body part orientation. Our findings implicate both visuomotor processes (Damasio and Maurer, 1978) and self-other mapping (Rogers and Pennington, 1991) in ASD imitation deficits. Following Goldenberg (1999), we propose that difficulties with body part orientation may underlie problems in meaningless gesture imitation

Speak before you think: the role of language in verb concepts

This study investigates the role of language on verb concepts in a cross-linguistic environment. The inflectional morphology of verbs in Tamil is contrasted with Mandarin, a language that does not explicitly reflect tense changes in the same manner as Tamil and English. In the baseline condition in experiment 1, participants were required to rate the similarity of object picture pairs; and in the experimental condition, they were asked to rate the similarity of action picture pairs. In experiment 2, participants’ similarity judgments and response latencies were recorded when they were presented with the object and action picture pairs. This allowed us to investigate the strength of linguistic influence when representing event concepts. Data from this study revealed a moderate influence of language on verb concepts in the target populations. There was a significant different in the response latencies of the Tamil and Chinese participants, although both language groups exhibited a similar response pattern in the action picture judgment task. This finding suggests that while both groups perceived the events similarly, language may be mediating their responses, resulting in longer response times for the Chinese participants. This could be because considering tense in Mandarin is not ‘automatic’ and requires extra work, possibly because it is not intrinsic to the verb

Veritable untruths:Autistic traits and the processing of deception

How do we decide whether a statement is literally true? Here, we contrast participants’ eventual evaluations of a speaker’s meaning with the real-time processes of comprehension. We record participants’ eye movements as they respond to potentially misleading instructions to click on one of two objects which might be concealing treasure (the treasure is behind thee, uh, hat). Participants are less likely to click on the named object when the instructions are disfluent. However, when hearing disfluent utterances, a tendency to fixate the named object early increases with participants’ autism quotient scores. This suggests that, even where utterances are equivalently understood, the processes by which interpretations are achieved vary across individuals

Not all disfluencies are are equal: The effects of disfluent repetitions on language comprehension

Disfluencies can affect language comprehension, but to date, most studies have focused on disfluent pauses such as er. We investigated whether disfluent repetitions in speech have discernible effects on listeners during language comprehension, and whether repetitions affect the linguistic processing of subsequent words in speech in ways which have been previously observed with ers. We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to measure participants’ neural responses to disfluent repetitions of words relative to acoustically identical words in fluent contexts, as well as to unpredictable and predictable words that occurred immediately post-disfluency and in fluent utterances. We additionally measured participants’ recognition memories for the predictable and unpredictable words. Repetitions elicited an early onsetting relative positivity (100–400 ms post-stimulus), clearly demonstrating listeners’ sensitivity to the presence of disfluent repetitions. Unpredictable words elicited an N400 effect. Importantly, there was no evidence that this effect, thought to reflect the difficulty of semantically integrating unpredictable compared to predictable words, differed quantitatively between fluent and disfluent utterances. Furthermore there was no evidence that the memorability of words was affected by the presence of a preceding repetition. These findings contrast with previous research which demonstrated an N400 attenuation of, and an increase in memorability for, words that were preceded by an er. However, in a later (600–900 ms) time window, unpredictable words following a repetition elicited a relative positivity. Reanalysis of previous data confirmed the presence of a similar effect following an er. The effect may reflect difficulties in resuming linguistic processing following any disruption to speech