Learning and consolidation of new spoken words in autism spectrum disorder

• Published in: Developmental science 2014-11, Vol.17 (6), p.858-871
• Main Authors: Henderson, Lisa, Powell, Anna, Gareth Gaskell, M., Norbury, Courtenay
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adolescent; Autism; Child; Child Development Disorders, Pervasive - complications; Children with disabilities; Cognition & reasoning; Female; Humans; Individual Differences; Knowledge Level; Language Acquisition; Language Tests; Learning Disorders - etiology; Male; Males; Mental Recall - physiology; Novelty (Stimulus Dimension); Pervasive Developmental Disorders; Phonetics; Reaction Time - physiology; Recall (Psychology); Recognition (Psychology); Semantics; Verbal Learning - physiology; Vocabulary; Vocabulary development
• ISSN: 1363-755X; 1467-7687
• DOI: 10.1111/desc.12169

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by rich heterogeneity in vocabulary knowledge and word knowledge that is not well accounted for by current cognitive theories. This study examines whether individual differences in vocabulary knowledge in ASD might be partly explained by a difficulty with consolidating newly learned spoken words and/or integrating them with existing knowledge. Nineteen boys with ASD and 19 typically developing (TD) boys matched on age and vocabulary knowledge showed similar improvements in recognition and recall of novel words (e.g. ‘biscal’) 24 hours after training, suggesting an intact ability to consolidate explicit knowledge of new spoken word forms. TD children showed competition effects for existing neighbors (e.g. ‘biscuit’) after 24 hours, suggesting that the new words had been integrated with existing knowledge over time. In contrast, children with ASD showed immediate competition effects that were not significant after 24 hours, suggesting a qualitative difference in the time course of lexical integration. These results are considered from the perspective of the dual‐memory systems framework. This study examines whether individual differences in vocabulary knowledge in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) might be partly explained by a difficulty with consolidating newly learned spoken words and/or their integration with existing knowledge. Nineteen boys with ASD and 19 typically developing (TD) boys matched on age and vocabulary knowledge showed similar improvements in recognition and recall of novel words (e.g. “biscal”) 24 hours after training, suggesting an intact ability to consolidate explicit knowledge of new spoken word forms. However, they showed striking differences in the extent to which they integrated the new words with existing lexical knowledge (indexed by lexical competition between new and existing words).