Predictive sentence comprehension during story-listening in autism spectrum disorder
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2019
Department/School
Psychology
Publication Title
Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
Abstract
Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) show a range of language production deficits, however, language comprehension in ASD remains under-studied in part because co-morbid social deficits affect behavioural compliance. This challenge can be overcome by engaging participants in a naturalistic task while passively collecting neural signals. To test predictive processing with naturalistic language, we collect MEG data while 16 8–12-year-old high-functioning participants with a clinical diagnosis of ASD and 16 age- and gender-matched typically developing peers listen to an audiobook story. The neuromagnetic signals are correlated with word-by-word states from a computational model that quantifies incremental sentence predictions in terms of surprisal. Consistent with prior eye-tracking work, our results are compatible with predictive parsing that is equivalent between high-functioning individuals with ASD and TD peers.
Link to Published Version
Recommended Citation
Brennan, J. R., Lajiness-O’Neill, R., Bowyer, S., Kovelman, I., & Hale, J. T. (2019). Predictive sentence comprehension during story-listening in autism spectrum disorder. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 34(4), 428–439. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2018.1560483