Autistic Children's Semantic Processing

The aim of this study was to investigate whether Chinese autistic children (AC) possess an impairment in semantic processing, and discuss the reasons leading to the impairment or lack thereof. Ten Chinese children with autism and ten matched typically developing children (TDC) undertook a serial of verbal recall tests. All participants were tested in four experiments, which were referred to as the no-cues condition, encoding-cues condition, retrieval-cues condition and full-cues condition.The results of this experiment were as follows:Firstly, for the total number of recall, AC was comparable with TDC. The only significant change emerged when cues were provided both for encoding and retrieval, where AC improved only in the full-cues condition, but not for each individual condition. AC were stronger with regards to the recall of semantically related words, especiaily in the encoding-cues condition and full-cues condition, showing significant levels of processing effects. Secondly, AC tended to cluster less than the matched TDC participants for semantically related words in the no-cues condition until they were provided with semantic encoding cues. Thirdly, AC had atypical serial position effects, showing strength in the recency serial position and weakness in the primacy serial position.This paper shows that Chinese autistic children have semantic impairment, the recall performance in AC is mediated by semantic factors to a lesser extent than in typical participants, and their deficit in encoding and retrieval are both factors. Semantic encoding and semantic retrieval deficits coexist in AC and the semantic encoding deficit in AC was very apparent, showing lower degrees of semantic encoding and tending to process the specific information, ignoring the related information of the stimulus materials. The results of this paper agree with the viewpoint of a development delay in semantic encoding in children with autism, and dispute the idea of a phonological processing bias with respect to participants with autism.