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Comprehension of Prosodically and Syntactically Marked Focus in Cantonese-Speaking Children With and Without Autism Spectrum Disorder

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Abstract

This study investigated the comprehension of prosodically and syntactically marked focus by 5- to 8-year-old Cantonese-speaking children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Children listened to question-answer dialogues while looking at pictures depicting the scenarios, and judged whether the answers were correct responses to the questions. The results showed that children with ASD exhibited typically developing (TD)-like performance in the use of syntactic cues to understand focus, although they were significantly slower than their TD peers. However, children with ASD had more difficulties than their TD peers in utilizing prosodic cues in focus comprehension. These findings suggest that the comprehension difficulties found in children with ASD are domain-selective, and children with ASD are sensitive to language-specific focus marking strategies.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the children and their families who participated in this study and gratefully acknowledge the support from the Heep Hong Society. We thank Arlene Lau and Christina Chan for their assistance with the study. The work described in this paper was substantially supported by two grants to the first author from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council – Faculty Development Scheme (Project Reference No.: UGC/FDS16/H13/19) and Katie Shu Sui Pui Charitable Trust – Research and Publication Fund (Project Reference No.: KS2018/2.2). FL was supported by a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant (CAASD, 678733). We thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Author Contributions

HG: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Writing – Original Draft. FL: Conceptualization, Writing – Original Draft. HY: Investigation, Formal analysis, Writing – Original Draft. AC: Writing – Original Draft. VY: Conceptualization, Writing – Original Draft. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

Funding

The work described in this paper was substantially supported by two grants to HG from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council – Faculty Development Scheme (Project Reference No.: UGC/FDS16/H13/19), and Katie Shu Sui Pui Charitable Trust – Research and Publication Fund (Project Reference No.: KS2018/2.2). FL was supported by a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant (CAASD, 678733).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Education and Languages, Hong Kong Metropolitan University, Ho Man Tin, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China

    Haoyan Ge & Hoi Kwan Yuen

  2. School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, The University of Reading, Reading, UK

    Fang Liu

  3. School of English Education, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China

    Aishu Chen

  4. Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages & Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China

    Virginia Yip

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  1. Haoyan Ge
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Correspondence to Haoyan Ge.

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Ge, H., Liu, F., Yuen, H.K. et al. Comprehension of Prosodically and Syntactically Marked Focus in Cantonese-Speaking Children With and Without Autism Spectrum Disorder. J Autism Dev Disord 53, 1255–1268 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-022-05770-1

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