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Question Comprehension in Autism Spectrum Conditions

Question Comprehension in Autism Spectrum Conditions
Language in neurodevelopmental disorders

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) have difficulties to initiate and follow a conversation as well as respect turn-taking. Understanding questions and answer them is essential for social interaction. In addition, prosody has a role in shaping questions to the point that there are languages such as Spanish where yes/no questions only differ from declaratives prosodically. As for wh-questions, ASC children understand them much later than typically developing (TD) children. They are also more difficult to answer than yes/no ones. The difficulty in answering wh-questions in simple and complex sentences in ASC should be clarified. They are used in the assessment of the understanding of false-belief (Sally-Anne task) and other explicit Theory of Mind (ToM) experiments. For this reason, the aim of this study is to assess the comprehension of different types of questions in ASC with and without intellectual disability in comparison to TD and individuals with intellectual disability. 

Principal researchers

Elisabet Vila