What’s That: Whole Object and Taxonomic Constraint in Children with Autism

Abstract

This paper focuses on determining how children with autism (ASD) approach word learning. Prior research has determined that non-autistic (NA) children exhibit word learning biases to assist with paring down potential or unlikely referent alternatives to effectively learn new word meanings. Some children with autism exhibit some of these word learning biases, but it is unclear if they exhibit two specific biases: the taxonomic and whole object biases. This project aims to investigate if children with ASD exhibit these biases, and if children with ASD perform similarly on the experimental tasks to their NA peers. 22 NA children ages 2-10 years participated in an analysis comparing their performance to that of children in previous studies and 11 ASD-NA pairs were matched for receptive language. Results suggest that children with ASD exhibit a taxonomic bias regardless of a label being presented or not, and that they exhibit a whole object bias. No statistically significant differences between groups arose for the taxonomic or whole object tasks, suggesting that children with ASD perform similarly to their NA peers. We anticipate this research will enhance our knowledge of how children with autism engage in the word learning process.