A Study On Semantic Processing Of Violation Of Reality In Chinese High-functioning Autistic Children

Counterfactuals are descriptions of events and states of affairs in the world that did not occur and reflect thinking activities that make counterfactual assumptions about known facts.Research has shown that children with high-functioning autism have difficulty understanding counterfactuals.However,few studies have examined the comprehension and processing of counterfactuals in children with high-functioning autism using the online technique,existing studies have not conducted an in-depth investigation of the reasons for the difficulties in counterfactuals comprehension in children with high-functioning autism.Therefore,the present study investigated the comprehension and processing patterns of counterfactuals in 10-13-year-old children with high-functioning autism(HFA)by comparing the online processing performance of counterfactuals in 10-13-year-old children with typical development(TD)and 10-13-year-old children with high-functioning autism(HFA)using the Event-Related Potential(ERP)technique.The main findings of this study were as follows.Chinese HFA children were more likely to judge the semantics of counterfactuals randomly.At the same time,there was no correlation between Chinese HFA children's correct judgments of the semantics of counterfactuals and their scores on executive functions.In addition,HFA children induced a larger P200 wave amplitude under the counterfactuals inconsistency condition compared with HFA children,and there was no significant difference in the P200 wave amplitude produced by the two groups under the other sentence type conditions.On the N400 index,no greater N400 wave amplitude was found in both groups of children under the counterfactuals conditional sentence processing.Taken together,this may reflect the different processing patterns of the two groups of children in processing the semantic meaning of the counterfactuals.The main findings of this study are as follows.First,compared with Chinese-speaking TD children of the same age,Chinesespeaking HFA children aged 10-13 had difficulties in the comprehension of the semantic meaning of counterfactuals.By further examining the executive functions of Chinese-speaking TD children and Chinese-speaking HFA children,the present study found that Chinese-speaking HFA children's difficulties in the comprehension of counterfactuals semantics were not related to their poorer executive functions.In addition,by comparing the electrophysiological responses to online processing of deficit semantics in Chinese TD children and Chinese HFA children,the present study found that the processing patterns of counterfactuals in Chinese high-functioning autistic children differed from those of typically developing children.For Chinese-speaking TD children,they are affected by the dual representation of the counterfactual conditional sentences in the pre-processing stage,while in the semantic integration stage,Chinese-speaking TD children can instantly map the subsequent semantic content to the corresponding virtual representations.For Chinese HFA children,they are affected by the dual representation of the counterfactual conditional sentences in the pre-processing stage as well,it is difficult to use virtual representations when processing the counterfactual sentences in semantic integration stage.This may reflect some difficulty in the retention and processing of virtual representations in HFA children.