Our research team has published a new paper in the journal Autism & Developmental Language Impairments exploring whether children with Autism Spectrum Disorder Level 1 (ASD-L1) experience difficulties in acquiring structural language. The study assessed the language skills of 89 children and preadolescents with ASD-L1, comparing them with a group of typically developing participants, both groups aged between 8 and 13 years.
The results show that children with ASD-L1 scored lower on tests of sentence repetition, semantic relationships, and morphological rules. This suggests that children with ASD-L1 face greater challenges in these areas of language compared to their typically developing peers.
This study also highlights that the language scores of children with ASD-L1 are closely related to their autistic traits, indicating that linguistic performance is strongly linked to the social symptoms of ASD.
Reference
Sánchez Pedroche, A., Valera-Pozo, M., Mateus Moreno, A., Lara Díaz, M. F., Aguilar-Mediavilla, E., & Adrover-Roig, D. (2024). Is language impaired in Spanish-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder level 1? Autism & Developmental Language Impairments, 9. https://doi.org/10.1177/23969415241275931