Abstract
The present study aimed to examine whether Mandarin-speaking children on the autism spectrum showed differences in comprehending spatial demonstratives (“this” and “that”, and “here” and “there”), as compared to typically developing (TD) children. Another aim of this study was to investigate the roles of theory of mind (ToM) and executive functions (EF) in the comprehension of spatial demonstratives. Twenty-seven autistic children (mean age 6.86) and 27 receptive-vocabulary-matched TD children (mean age 5.82) were recruited. Demonstrative comprehension was assessed based on participants’ ability to place objects in certain locations according to experimenters’ instructions which involved these demonstratives in three different conditions (same-, opposite-, and spectator-perspective conditions). Four false-belief tasks were administered to measure ToM, and the word-span task and the dimensional change card sort task were used to measure two subcomponents of EF – working memory and mental flexibility – respectively. Children on the autism spectrum were found to score below TD children in the comprehension of spatial demonstratives. In addition, the results showed that ToM and working memory were conducive to the correct interpretation of spatial demonstratives. The two cognitive abilities mutually influenced their respective roles in spatial demonstrative comprehension in the three different conditions. The findings suggest that the comprehension of spatial demonstratives comprehension is an area of need in Mandarin-speaking children on the autism spectrum, and it might be linked to their differences in cognitive abilities.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The two-sample t-test was used when comparing receptive vocabulary in the two groups of children because both groups were sampled from normal distributions with equal variances in terms of receptive vocabulary. Mann-Whitney U-test was used for comparing age because the data were not normally distributed according to the results of the Shapiro-Wilk tests (p-values < 0.05).
As the forward condition of the word span task reflects short-term memory instead of WM (Kail & Hall, 2001), only the backward condition was considered.
References
Akbar, M., Loomis, R., & Paul, R. (2013). The interplay of language on executive functions in children with ASD. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 7(3), 494–501. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rasd.2012.09.001
American Psychiatric Association. (2000). Diagnostic and statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.). American Psychiatric Association.
American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.). American psychiatric association.
Andreou, M., & Skrimpa, V. (2020). Theory of mind deficits and neurophysiological operations in autism spectrum disorders: A review. Brain Sciences, 10(6), 393. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci10060393
Andrés-Roqueta, C., & Katsos, N. (2017). The contribution of grammar, vocabulary and theory of mind in pragmatic language competence in children with autistic spectrum disorders. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 996. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00996
Baayen, H. (2008). Analyzing linguistic data: A practical introduction to statistics using R. Cambridge University Press.
Baddeley, A. (1992). Working memory. Science, 255(5044), 556–559.
Baddeley, A. (2000). The episodic buffer: A new component of working memory? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4(11), 417–423. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(00)01538-2
Baron-Cohen, S. (1988). Social and pragmatic deficits in autism: Cognitive or affective? Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 18(3), 379–402. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02212194
Baron-Cohen, S. (2001). Theory of mind in normal development and autism. Prisme, 34(1), 74–183.
Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind” ? Cognition, 21(1), 37–46. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(85)90022-8
Bartolucci, G., & Albers, R. J. (1974). Deictic categories in the language of autistic children. Journal of Autism and Childhood Schizophrenia, 4(2), 131–141. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02105366
Belsley, D. A., Kuh, E., & Welsch, R. E. (1980). Regression diagnostics: Identifying influential data and sources of collinearity. John Wiley.
Blything, L. P., & Cain, K. (2016). Children’s processing and comprehension of complex sentences containing temporal connectives: The influence of memory on the time course of accurate responses. Developmental Psychology, 52(10), 1517–1529. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0000201
Brüne, M., & Bodenstein, L. (2005). Proverb comprehension reconsidered—‘theory of mind’and the pragmatic use of language in schizophrenia. Schizophrenia Research, 75(2–3), 233–239. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.schres.2004.11.006
Cardillo, R., Mammarella, I. C., Demurie, E., Giofre, D., & Roeyers, H. (2021). Pragmatic language in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder: Do theory of mind and executive functions have a mediating role? Autism Research, 14(5), 932–945. https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.2423
Cheung, H., Chen, H. C., & Yeung, W. (2009). Relations between mental verb and false belief understanding in cantonese-speaking children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 104(2), 141–155. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2009.05.004
Cheung, C. C. H., Rong, Y., Chen, F., Chen, S., Leung, M. T., Tang, T. P. Y., & Peng, G. (2020). Comprehension of literal statements and similes in cantonese-speaking children with and without autism spectrum disorders. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 34(4), 312–326. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699206.2019.1634765
Chu, C. Y., & Minai, U. (2014). Comprehension of the demonstratives by Chinese-speaking preschool children. Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Chinese Languages and Linguistics, 109–123. http://iscll-14.ling.sinica.edu.tw/files-pdf/Papers/Session3/ChuMinai.pdf
Chu, C. Y., & Minai, U. (2018). Children’s demonstrative comprehension and the role of non-linguistic cognitive abilities: A cross-linguistic study. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 47(6), 1343–1368. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-018-9565-8
Clark, E. V., & Sengul, C. J. (1978). Strategies in the acquisition of deixis. Journal of Child Language, 5(3), 457–475. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000900002099
Cohen, S., & Wills, T. (1985). Stress, social support, and the buffering hypothesis. Psychological Bulletin, 98(2), 310–357. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.98.2.310
Davis, H. L., & Pratt, C. (1995). The development of children’s theory of mind: The working memory explanation. Australian Journal of Psychology, 47(1), 25–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/00049539508258765
de Villiers, P. A., & de Villiers, J. G. (1974). On this, that, and the other: Nonegocentrism in very young children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 18(3), 438–447. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-0965(74)90122-2
de Vries, M., & Geurts, H. M. (2012). Cognitive flexibility in ASD; task switching with emotional faces. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 42(12), 2558–2568. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-012-1512-1
Deliens, G., Papastamou, F., Ruytenbeek, N., Geelhand, P., & Kissine, M. (2018). Selective pragmatic impairment in autism spectrum disorder: Indirect requests versus irony. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 48(9), 2938–2952. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-018-3561-6
Demetriou, E. A., Lampit, A., Quintana, D. S., Naismith, S. L., Song, Y. J. C., Pye, J. E., Hickie, I., & Guastella, A. J. (2018). Autism spectrum disorders: A meta-analysis of executive function. Molecular Psychiatry, 23(5), 1198–1204. https://doi.org/10.1038/mp.2017.75
Diamond, A. (2013). Executive functions. Annual Review of Psychology, 64(1), 135–168. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-113011-143750
Diamond, A., & Kirkham, N. (2005). Not quite as grown-up as we like to think. Psychological Science, 16(4), 291–297. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0956-7976.2005.01530.x
Diessel, H. (1999). Demonstratives. Form, function, and grammaticalization. John Benjamins.
Dinulescu, S., Alvi, T., Rosenfield, D., Sunahara, C. S., Lee, J., & Tabak, B. A. (2021). Self-referential processing predicts social cognitive ability. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 12(1), 99–107. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550620902281
Douglas, J. (2013). Conceptualising self and maintaining social connection following severe traumatic brain injury. Brain Injury, 27(1), 60–74. https://doi.org/10.3109/02699052.2012.722254
Fillmore, C. J. (1975). An alternative to checklist theories of meaning. The Proceedings of Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 1, 123–131. https://doi.org/10.3765/bls.v1i0.2315
Flavell, J. H., Botkin, P. T., Fry, C. L., Wright, J. W., & Jarvis, P. E. (1968). The development of role-taking and communicative skills in children. Wiley.
Flavell, J. H., Green, F. L., & Flavell, E. R. (1986). Development of knowledge about the appearance-reality distinction. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 51(5), 1–87.
Friedman, L., Lorang, E., & Sterling, A. (2019). The use of demonstratives and personal pronouns in fragile X syndrome and autism spectrum disorder. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 33(5), 420–436. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699206.2018.1536727
Gillihan, S. J., & Farah, M. J. (2005). Is self special? A critical review of evidence from experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Psychological Bulletin, 131(1), 76. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.131.1.76
Hamilton, A. F., de Brindley, C., R., & Frith, U. (2009). Visual perspective taking impairment in children with autistic spectrum disorder. Cognition, 113(1), 37–44. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2009.07.007
Hobson, R. P., García-Pérez, R. M., & Lee, A. (2010a). Person-centred (deictic) expressions and autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 40(4), 403–415. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-009-0882-5.
Hobson, R. P., Lee, A., & Hobson, J. A. (2010b). Personal pronouns and communicative engagement in autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 40(6), 653–664. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-009-0910-5.
Huang, S. F., Oi, M., & Taguchi, A. (2015). Comprehension of figurative language in taiwanese children with autism: The role of theory of mind and receptive vocabulary. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 29(8–10), 764–775. https://doi.org/10.3109/02699206.2015.1027833
Jetten, J., Haslam, C., & Haslam, S. A. (2012). The social cure: Identity, health & wellbeing. Psychology Press. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203813195
Joseph, R. M., & Tager–Flusberg, H. (2004). The relationship of theory of mind and executive functions to symptom type and severity in children with autism. Development and Psychopathology, 16(1), 137–155. https://doi.org/10.1017/S095457940404444X
Landis, J. R., & Koch, G. G. (1977). The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data. Biometrics, 33, 159–174. https://doi.org/10.2307/2529310
Landry, S. H., & Loveland, K. A. (1988). Communication behaviors in autism and developmental language delay. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 29(5), 621–634. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.1988.tb01884.x
Landry, S. H., & Loveland, K. A. (1989). The effect of social context on the functional communication skills of autistic children. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 19(2), 283–299. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02211847
Lecce, S., Ronchi, L., Del Sette, P., Bischetti, L., & Bambini, V. (2019). Interpreting physical and mental metaphors: Is theory of mind associated with pragmatics in middle childhood? Journal of Child Language, 46(2), 393–407. https://doi.org/10.1017/S030500091800048X
Lee, A., Hobson, R. P., & Chiat, S. (1994). I, you, me, and autism: An experimental study. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 24(2), 155–176. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02172094
Levinson, S. C. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press.
Li, H., & Leung, M. T. (2020). Relations between verb factivity and first-order and second-order false belief understanding: Evidence from Mandarin-speaking typically developing children and children with autism spectrum disorders. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 34(1–2), 185–200. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699206.2019.1628810
Li, Y., & Zhu, J. (2014). Instruction manual of chinese version of the Wechsler Preschool and primary scale of intelligence (4th ed.). King-May Psychological Measurement Technology Development Co., Ltd.
Loveland, K. A., & Landry, S. H. (1986). Joint attention and language in autism and developmental language delay. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 16(3), 335–349. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01531663
Matthews, D., Biney, H., & Abbot-Smith, K. (2018). Individual differences in children’s pragmatic ability: A review of associations with formal language, social cognition, and executive functions. Language Learning and Development, 14(3), 186–223. https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2018.1455584
Miyake, A., Friedman, N. P., Emerson, M. J., Witzki, A. H., Howerter, A., & Wager, T. D. (2000). The unity and diversity of executive functions and their contributions to complex “frontal lobe” tasks: A latent variable analysis. Cognitive Psychology, 41(1), 49–100. https://doi.org/10.1006/cogp.1999.0734
Overweg, J., Hartman, C. A., & Hendriks, P. (2018a). Children with autism spectrum disorder show pronoun reversals in interpretation. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 127(2), 228–238. https://doi.org/10.1037/abn0000338
Overweg, J., Hartman, C. A., & Hendriks, P. (2018b). Temporarily out of order: Temporal perspective taking in language in children with autism spectrum disorder. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1663. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01663
Pearson, A., Ropar, D., & de Hamilton, A. F. C (2013). A review of visual perspective taking in autism spectrum disorder. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7, 652. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00652
Perner, J., Leekam, S. R., & Wimmer, H. (1987). Three-year‐olds’ difficulty with false belief: The case for a conceptual deficit. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 5(2), 125–137.
Philofsky, A., Fidler, D. J., & Hepburn, S. (2007). Pragmatic language profiles of school-age children with autism spectrum disorders and Williams syndrome. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 16(4), 368–380. https://doi.org/10.1044/1058-0360(2007/040)
Piaget, J., & Inhelder, B. (1956). The child’s conception of space. Routled Kegan Paul.
Premack, D., & Woodruff, G. (1978). Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1(4), 515–526. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00076512
Sang, B., & Miao, X. (1990). The revision of trial norm of Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test revised (PPTV-R) in Shanghai proper. Information on Psychological Sciences, 5, 20–25.
Schettino, A., Lauro, L. R., Crippa, F., Anselmetti, S., Cavallaro, R., & Papagno, C. (2010). The comprehension of idiomatic expressions in schizophrenic patients. Neuropsychologia, 48(4), 1032–1040. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2009.11.030
Scott, W. A. (1962). Cognitive complexity and cognitive flexibility. Sociometry, 25(4), 405–414. https://doi.org/10.2307/2785779
Snow, P., & Douglas, J. (2017). Psychosocial aspects of pragmatic disorders. In L. Cummings (Ed.), Research in clinical pragmatics (pp. 617–649). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47489-2_23
Swartz, K., & Hall, A. E. (1972). Development of relational concepts and word definition in children five through eleven. Child Development, 43(1), 239–244.
Symons, C. S., & Johnson, B. T. (1997). The self-reference effect in memory: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 121(3), 371–394. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.121.3.371
Tager-Flusberg, H., Calkins, S., Nolin, T., Baumberger, T., Anderson, M., & Chadwick-Dias, A. (1990). A longitudinal study of language acquisition in autistic and down syndrome children. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 20(1), 1–21.
Tfouni, L. V., & Klatzky, R. L. (1983). A discourse analysis of deixis: Pragmatic, cognitive and semantic factors in the comprehension of ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘here’ and ‘there’. Journal of Child Language, 10(1), 123–133. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000900005183
Volden, J. (2017). Autism spectrum disorder. In L. Cummings (Ed.), Research in clinical pragmatics (pp. 59–83). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47489-2_3
Webb, P. A., & Abrahamson, A. A. (1976). Stages of egocentrism in children’s use of ‘this’ and ‘that’: A different point of view. Journal of Child Language, 3(3), 349–367.
Williams, D. M., Nicholson, T., & Grainger, C. (2018). The self-reference effect on perception: Undiminished in adults with autism and no relation to autism traits. Autism Research, 11, 331–341. https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.1891
Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children’s understanding of deception. Cognition, 13(1), 103–128. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(83)90004-5
Zelazo, P. D. (2006). The Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS): A method of assessing executive function in children. Nature Protocols, 1(1), 297–301. https://doi.org/10.1038/nprot.2006.46
Zelazo, P. D., Frye, D., & Rapus, T. (1996). An age-related dissociation between knowing rules and using them. Cognitive Development, 11(1), 37–63. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0885-2014(96)90027-1
Zhang, H. (2008). Instruction manual of chinese version of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (4th ed.). King-May Psychological Measurement Technology Development Co., Ltd.
Zhao, Y. (2007). Children’s acquisition of demonstrative pronouns in Mandarin Chinese. The Proceedings of the 21st Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, 532–541. https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/Y07-1055.pdf
Zhu, M., Cao, F., & Zhang, R. (1986). Young children’s interpretation of demonstrative pronouns. Journal of Psychological Science, 3, 3–8.
Funding
This work was funded by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of Interest
The author declares there is no conflict of interest.
Ethics Approval
This study was approved by the Human Subjects Ethics Sub-committee at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (approval number: HSEARS20201119001). All procedures performed in this study were in compliance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee and with the ethical principles outlined in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its subsequent revisions.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Electronic Supplementary Material
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Rong, Y. Comprehension of Spatial Demonstratives in Mandarin-speaking Children on the Autism Spectrum: The Roles of Theory of Mind and Executive Function. J Autism Dev Disord (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-023-06111-6
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-023-06111-6