Category structure and processing in 6-year-old children with autism.

Category structure and processing in 6-year-old children with autism.

Autism Res. 2016 Jul 12;

Authors: Ellawadi AB, Fein D, Naigles LR

Abstract
The ability to form categories is fundamental to understanding the world. Although individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are frequently described as having poor categorization abilities, there are mixed findings across research studies. This study investigated the categorization abilities of 6-year-old children with ASD as compared to their peers with typical language development (TD). We examined the impact of stimulus typicality, how representative a category member is of that category (e.g., sparrows are typical members of the category bird, whereas ostriches are atypical category members) on accuracy, reaction time, and performance stability. Both groups were more accurate in identifying typical category members than atypical ones. The accuracy of the children in the ASD group was affected by item ordering, indicating less stable performance. Furthermore, category structure was predicted by concurrent language levels in the TD group but by concurrent nonverbal IQ in the ASD group. Together these findings suggest that children with ASD process categories differently than their peers with TD.

PMID: 27404567 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

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