When do children with Autism Spectrum Disorder take common ground into account during communication?

One feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a deficit in verbal reference production; i.e., providing an appropriate amount of verbal information for the listener to refer to things, people, and events. However, very few studies have manipulated whether individuals with ASD can take a speaker’s perspective in order to interpret verbal reference. A critical limitation of all interpretation studies is that comprehension of another’s verbal reference required the participant to represent only the other’s visual perspective. Yet, many everyday interpretations of verbal reference require knowledge of social perspective (i.e., a consideration of which experiences one has shared with which interlocutor). We investigated whether 22 5;0- to 7;11-year-old children with ASD and 22 well-matched typically developing (TD) children used social perspective to comprehend (Study 1) and produce (Study 2) verbal reference. Social perspective-taking was manipulated by having children collaboratively complete activities with one of two interlocutors such that for a given activity, one interlocutor was Knowledgeable and one was Naïve. Study 1 found no between-group differences for the interpretation of ambiguous references based on social perspective. In Study 2, when producing referring terms, the ASD group made modifications based on listener needs, but this effect was significantly stronger in the TD group. Overall, the findings suggest that high-functioning children with ASD know with which interlocutor they have previously shared a given experience and can take this information into account to steer verbal reference. Nonetheless, they show clear performance limitations in this regard relative to well-matched controls

CHILDREN’S UNDERSTANDING OF THE SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY CYCLE

Science education comprises knowledge about concepts and theories, as well as understanding how scientific knowledge is generated. An initial grasp of the inquiry cycle, emphasizing its cyclical and cumulative nature, is a key goal for learners. Studies suggest that simply applying research cycle steps doesn't inherently foster a deeper understanding; explicit discussion is essential. This project aims to identify how preschool children best comprehend the inquiry cycle by comparing different learning supports and examining varied examples

Error patterns in young German children's wh-questions

ABSTRACTIn this article we report two studies: a detailed longitudinal analysis of errors in wh-questions from six German-learning children (age 2 ; 0–3 ; 0) and an analysis of the prosodic characteristics of wh-questions in German child-directed speech. The results of the first study demonstrate that German-learning children frequently omit the initial wh-word. A lexical analysis of wh-less questions revealed that children are more likely to omit the wh-word was (‘what’) than other wh-words (e.g. wo ‘where’). In the second study, we performed an acoustic analysis of sixty wh-questions that one mother produced during her child's third year of life. The results show that the wh-word was is much less likely to be accented than the wh-word wo, indicating a relationship between children's omission of wh-words and the stress patterns associated with wh-questions. The findings are discussed in the light of discourse–pragmatic and metrical accounts of omission errors.</jats:p