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Comprehension of reflexive and personal pronouns in children with autism: A

syntactic or pragmatic deficit?

Article  in  Applied Psycholinguistics · July 2013

DOI: 10.1017/S0142716412000033

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 TITLE: Comprehension of reflexive and personal pronouns in children with autism:

a syntactic or pragmatic deficit?

Corresponding author:

Dr. Alexandra Perovic

Developmental Science Department

Division of Psychology and Language Sciences

University College London

Chandler House

2 Wakefield Street

London WC1N 1PF

UK

Dr. Nadya Modyanova, Prof. Ken Wexler

Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Massachussetts Institute of Technology

77 Massachusetts Avenue

Cambridge, MA 02139

USA

1
ABSTRACT

While pragmatic deficits are well documented in autism, little is known about the extent to which

grammatical knowledge in this disorder is deficient, or merely delayed when compared to that of

typically developing children functioning at similar linguistic or cognitive levels. This study

examines the knowledge of constraints on the interpretation of personal and reflexive pronouns, an

aspect of grammar not previously investigated in autism, and known to be subject to differential

developmental schedules in unimpaired development. Fourteen children with autism (CA: 6-17,

M=11) showed some difficulties comprehending personal pronouns, no different from those

observed in two groups of younger controls matched on non-verbal IQ or receptive grammar, but in

line with the reported pragmatic deficits and general language delay in this population. However,

their interpretation of reflexives was significantly worse than that of the control children. This

pattern is not evidenced at any stage of typical development, revealing an impaired grammatical

knowledge in our sample of children with autism, and is argued not to be due to a general

language delay or cognitive deficits.

Deficits in language and communication are known to be one of the defining characteristics and

diagnostic criteria of autism (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). Individuals with autism

form a rather heterogeneous group with respect to their language abilities, which range from

mutism and little functional communication to relatively well-developed language. A common

characteristic of these individuals, however, is that they all share impairments in pragmatic and

conversational skills.

Less is known about grammatical development in this population. It has been argued that it

follows the same path as that in typically developing (TD) children matched on mental age

(MA), although at a slower rate (Tager-Flusberg, 1981; Tager-Flusberg at al, 1990; Lord & Paul,

1997). However, some results reported in both early and very recent research seem to suggest

2
otherwise. Early studies revealed difficulties in the use of grammatical morphology in

spontaneous speech of children with autism, not dissimilar to those seen in children with

developmental dysphasia, or Specific Language Impairment (SLI) (Churchill, 1972; Bartolucci,

Pierce & Streiner, 1980). Difficulties with grammatical morphemes marking tense (e.g. ‘John

goes’, where the verb is correctly marked for tense vs. the incorrect ‘John go’) and present

progressive (‘John is going’) have been confirmed more recently (Roberts, Rice & Tager-

Flusberg, 2004; Eigsti & Bennetto, 2009). Using a computational measure introduced in

accounts of the Optional Infinitive stage (difficulties in marking the finiteness of verbs, Wexler,

1993) in TD and SLI children, Roberts et al (2004) reported that performance of children with

autism was poorer than expected for their general level of both linguistic and cognitive

development, indicating a specific morphosyntactic deficit in this population. Note that difficulty

with tense marking is argued to be a reliable clinical marker of SLI (Rice and Wexler, 1996).

These findings are particularly interesting in view of reports suggesting a genetic link between

autism and SLI (Fombonne et al, 1997; Tomblin, Hafeman & O’Brien, 2003, Vernes et al, 2008),

as well as a recent claim that the two disorders could even be on a continuum (Bishop, 2003a).

Mapping out a detailed linguistic profile in the population with autism is crucial to both

establishing reliable differences between autism and other developmental disorders, such as SLI,

as well as understanding the heterogeneity of the grammatical abilities of individuals on the

autism spectrum.

However, there is little consistent data on the comprehension of complex syntactic

structures. Research on grammar in autism traditionally entails investigations of spontaneous

speech and analyses of results obtained by standardized tests of language abilities. While these

methods generate a wealth of important data, contexts in which complex grammatical structures

3
are produced are often limited, thus failing to give a reliable picture of an individual’s

competence. In addition to the studies reporting difficulties with verb inflection mentioned

earlier, the few experimental studies of complex grammar suggest that passives (Perovic et al,

2007; Tager-Flusberg, 1981) and relative clauses also seem susceptible to impairment (Riches,

Loucas, Charman, Simonoff & Baird, 2009), as well as some operations at the

syntactic/semantic/pragmatic interfaces, such as marking of definiteness (Modyanova, 2009).

The lack of consensus on the issue of whether grammar in autism is simply delayed or

also deviant, coupled with a scarcity of studies implementing experimental methods, calls for

investigations of formal aspects of grammar in this population in more depth. The aim of our

study is to investigate binding in children with autism. Binding is the area of grammar that

concerns constraints on the distribution of personal and reflexive pronouns. There is no previous

experimental research in this area in the population with autism, however, difficulties with using

personal pronouns in spontaneous speech have been reported (Lee, Hobson & Chiat, 1994). Like

young TD children, children with autism have been found to interpret you as I, and vice versa.

This phenomenon, termed ‘pronoun reversal’, is argued to be due to their difficulties with

shifting reference, and to general problems with pragmatics. Nothing is known about how

children with autism interpret personal vs. reflexive pronouns. Experimental research on typical

development reports specific difficulties in the interpretation of personal but not reflexive

pronouns: even after 6 years of age, TD children frequently interpret sentences involving

personal pronouns such as Mary washes her to mean Mary washes herself. This robust

phenomenon, termed ‘the Delay of Principle B Effect’ (to be discussed in more detail in the

following section) has been explained by appealing to the distinct nature of the principles which

guide the interpretation of reflexive as opposed to personal pronouns: reflexives are interpreted

4
by relying on constraints that are purely syntactic in nature, while personal pronouns are

regulated by both syntactic and extra-syntactic (i.e. pragmatic) constraints. Syntactic constraints

are in place early, but the development of pragmatic constraints takes time (Chien & Wexler,

1985; Thornton & Wexler, 1999), thus the pattern in typical development is understood as being

due to TD children’s prolonged maturation of pragmatic and not syntactic principles. In view of

reported errors in production of personal pronouns and general difficulties in pragmatics and

understanding of intention in autism, an in-depth investigation of the knowledge of constraints

regulating the interpretation of both reflexive and personal pronouns in this population seems

particularly pressing. If language in autism is delayed, but develops in a fashion parallel to

typical development, a similar - or even more exaggerated - pattern of difficulties with pronouns

is expected, in line with reported pragmatic deficits in this population. However, if syntactic

knowledge is also affected, children may show difficulties interpreting reflexives that cannot be

accounted for by a simple language delay. The following section outlines the theory of binding,

its acquisition in the typical populations and spells out the predictions for children with autism,

thus providing a rationale for our study.

CONSTRAINTS GOVERNING PERSONAL AND REFLEXIVE PRONOUNS IN TYPICAL

ACQUISITION

Our implicit knowledge of the constraints involved in assigning reference leads us to interpret

the reflexive pronoun, herself, as referring to only one of the female characters mentioned in

sentence 1.a below – Susan. To be interpreted as herself, the noun phrase (NP) Susan (its

5
‘antecedent’), has to be ‘nearest’ to the reflexive. The index next to a NP refers to the referent of

the NP.

1. a. Maryi says that Susanj likes herselfj.

b. Maryi says that Susanj likes heri.

The personal pronoun her, in (1b), is interpreted as referring to Mary, the NP ‘furthest away’

from the pronoun.

The facts of the distribution of reflexive and personal pronouns have been captured in structural

terms by the Binding Principles of Chomsky (1986)1, given in 2.

2. a. Principle A: a reflexive must be locally bound.

b. Principle B: a pronoun must be locally free.2

As stated above, the binding principles describe the complementary distribution of reflexives and

pronouns. This is illustrated in the examples 3a and 3b: Principle A forces the reflexive to

corefer with Mary in 3a, while Principle B excludes coreference of pronoun and Mary in 3b.

3. a. Maryi adores herselfi/*j

b. Maryi adores her*i/j

Being part of the computational aspects of our linguistic knowledge, compliance with

binding principles is expected to be seen early on. Knowledge of Principle A, which demands

that a reflexive have a local antecedent in the sentence, is acquired by TD children at least by age

4 (Jakubowicz, 1984; Wexler & Chien, 1985; Chien & Wexler, 1990). In Wexler & Chien

6
(1985), structure (4) was tested with the aid of a two-choice picture task in 129 children, aged

2;6 to 6;6 (and adult controls). Their performance grew with age; six year olds gave greater than

90% correct performance (chance is 50%).

4. Cinderella’s sister points to herself.

Note that when tested on the constructions above, young children also show their understanding

of the c-command component of binding, as possessives allow for two potential antecedents of

the relevant pronominal element: one c-commanding (the entire NP, ‘Cinderella’s sister’), the

other non-c-commanding (the Genitive NP ‘Cinderella’). Possessive NPs are argued to appear

early in typical development (Tomasello, 1998), at least by age 4 (Golinkoff & Markessini,

1980; Bannard & Matthews, 2008), thus any difficulties with these constructions should to be

due to children’s incomplete mastery of the binding principles, and not of the possessive NP.

In contrast, at around the same age, TD children have a great deal of trouble with constructions

that involve personal pronouns:

5. Cinderella’s sister points to her.

In the context of a forced-choice task (where one picture shows the sister pointing to

Cinderella, and the other picture shows the sister pointing to herself), the sentence in (5) cannot

mean that Cinderella’s sister pointed to the sister, but must mean that she pointed to Cinderella.

Wexler and Chien (1985) report that in the 2-choice picture task, 5;6 year-old children (the same

7
children who do very well in reflexives) were still around chance, and performance increased to

less than 60% for the 6 year-olds. This robust pattern, termed ‘Delay of Principle B Effect’

(DPBE), has been replicated in a number of studies for English (Chien & Wexler, 1990;

Thornton, 1990; Boster, 1991; Avrutin & Thornton, 1994; Thornton & Wexler, 1999) and has

also been observed crosslinguistically (e.g. Dutch: Philip & Coopmans, 1996; Hebrew:

Friedmann, Novogrodsky & Balaban, 2010; Icelandic: Sigurjonsdottir, 1992; Russian: Avrutin &

Wexler, 1992). Acquisition of binding has been one of the most fertile areas in the field of

language acquisition (see Guasti, 2002, for a review) and the famous phenomenon of DPBE is

still debated in the literature, two decades on. It has been noted that very young children may not

show the difference in their performance on reflexives vs. pronouns (such as 2;6 year olds in

Wexler & Chien, 1985, or the 3 year old Hebrew speakers in Ruigendijk, Friedmann,

Novogrodsky & Balaban, 2010) and that the pattern may be more robust in comprehension than

in production (Bloom, Barss, Nicol & Conway, 1994; Hendriks & Spenader, 2005/2006, but see

Ruigendijk et al, 2010, for data in Hebrew and German that present an argument against the

asymmetry in comprehension and production).

What is it that children don’t know about the principles that constrain the use of

pronouns? Chien & Wexler (1990, followed by other researchers) argued that this result is due to

the different nature of constraints governing personal pronouns, as opposed to reflexives.

Binding Principles, as given in 2, regulate syntactic binding only, where the bound item is a

bound variable. Reflexives are subject to syntactic binding only. Pronouns can be ambiguous

between a coreferential and a bound variable reading:3 when a bound variable, they are regulated

by Principle B, but when interpreted coreferentially, they are subject to constraints that are non-

syntactic in nature (pragmatic, according to Chien & Wexler, 1990, or processing, as argued by

8
Grodzinsky and Reinhart, 1993).4 Children thus have the knowledge of Principle B, the

constraint governing the bound variable interpretation, but their difficulties with pronouns are

due to limitations in implementing non-syntactic constraints which govern illicit coreference.

Chien and Wexler (1990) argue that the high rate of errors in accepting the coreferential reading

of (5) should be interpreted as a pragmatic error (failure of ‘Principle P’).5 Importantly, the same

study reports additional experimental data confirming that children are sensitive to the distinction

between binding and coreference. In contexts where a coreferential reading is not available, i.e.

when pronouns are bound by quantified antecedents, children show no difficulties rejecting an

ungrammatical sentence such as (6).

6. *Every beari is washing heri.

This is because quantifiers, like other operators, have no definite referents and accidental

coreference is not an option – there is no ambiguity and no chance for children to fail. The same

5-6 year old children in Chien & Wexler who show a chance performance on structures where

the pronoun refers to the referential antecedent, reached 84% correct performance on

constructions involving a quantified antecedent. These findings have been confirmed in other

languages (Russian: Avrutin & Wexler, 1992; Dutch: Philip & Coopmans, 1996) where children

have been shown to accept illicit coreference between a pronoun and a local referential

antecedent. The pattern of children’s better performance on pronouns when referential as

opposed to when bound by a quantificational antecedent has been disputed at both ends of the

spectrum. On the one end, Elbourne (2005) argues that quantificational asymmetry is not real:

children have difficulties interpreting pronouns both with referential and quantified antecedents

i.e. they lack the knowledge of Principle B altogether, until at least about 6 years of age. Conroy,

9
Takashi, Lidz & Philips (2010), on the other end, argue that DPBE is an experimental artifact: in

their study, children are able to interpret pronouns both bound and referential. Both studies

question the Truth Value Judgment method used in the original experiments displaying the

DPBE with referential pronouns and the lack of it with bound pronouns. Further research is

needed to help us decide between conflicting data and arguments, however, this issue is not of

immediate concern to us: we aim to replicate studies which use a picture selection method, and

not TVJ, and focus on children’s comprehension of referential pronouns, not those bound by

quantified antecedents.

PREDICTIONS FOR CHILDREN WITH AUTISM

The result that TD children as old as 6 are still missing some crucial pragmatic abilities (while

the related aspects of grammar have been acquired) provides an important opportunity to test

hypotheses concerning language abilities in autism. We formulate these hypotheses as follows:

1. If only pragmatic, but not syntactic knowledge is affected in autism, children with this

disorder will show difficulties in interpreting personal but not reflexive pronouns, displaying a

pattern parallel to unimpaired development. An even more exaggerated pattern of difficulties

with personal pronouns might be expected in autism compared to unimpaired development, in

view of reported language delays in this population.

2. If, however, syntactic knowledge is also affected in autism, children may show difficulties

interpreting reflexives, since interpretation of these elements is guided by principles that are

purely syntactic in nature. A pattern of a worse performance on reflexives as opposed to, or in

10
addition to pronouns, would be a sign of deviance, and cannot be accounted for by a simple

language delay since it is not evidenced in the course of typical acquisition.

In the ensuing sections, we present a study of the knowledge of binding in children with

autism, aged 6-17. This age range was chosen to account for any initial delays in language

development in this population. Following Wexler & Chien (1985), whose task was successfully

used with over 100 English-speaking TD children, we aim to also test the knowledge of the c-

command part of Principles A and B in our participants, by using a possessive subject which

introduces both a c-commanding and a non-c-commanding local antecedent to the reflexive or

personal pronoun in question. Testing c-command is important because failures of interpretation

could be due to failures in calculating c-command or to more general binding principle failures.

To examine any effects of verbal as opposed to non-verbal abilities in the population with

autism, our participants were carefully matched to TD controls on standardized measures of

verbal and non-verbal abilities. Binding principles have never been investigated in children with

autism before, nor have the possessive structures, thus we hope that our investigation will fill an

important gap in the literature with respect to comparing the grammar in autism to that of TD

children.

METHOD

Participants

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 Forty five children, eighteen clinically diagnosed with autism and 27 TD controls, were

recruited for the study. The children with autism, aged 6;6-17 (M=11;6), were recruited with the

help of Children’s Boston Hospital and autism parent support groups in Massachusetts. Four

autistic children (7-10 year olds) were excluded from this group as they were unable to complete

the test battery, thus the complete set of data was obtained from 14 participants with autism (of

which three were girls). Their overall IQ, as measured by Kaufman Brief Test of Intelligence

(KBIT, Kaufman & Kaufman, 1990), ranged from 40 to 98, M=64.38 (SD: 20.55) (cf. Table 1).

Their scores on different standardized measures reveal some disparity between non-verbal and

verbal abilities, but these differences did not prove to be statistically significant: on the Matrices

subtest of KBIT which measures non-verbal IQ, their mean standard score (SS) was M=65.93

(SD: 20.37); on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, 3rd edition (PPVT-III, Dunn & Dunn,

1997), the test of receptive vocabulary, it was 56.57 (SD: 15.81), and on the Test for Reception

of Grammar, 2nd edition (TROG-2, Bishop, 2003b), their mean score was M=56.50 (SD: 4.05). It

may be noted that these children’s scores appeared uniformly poorer on TROG as opposed to

PPVT: 12 out of 14 children were at floor on TROG, whereas 4 out of 14 children were at floor

on PPVT.

Unimpaired controls, aged 3-9, were recruited from day care centers and schools in

Boston, MA, and were individually matched to children with autism on the raw scores of one of

the two measures, the Matrices subtest of KBIT (no more than 1 point off), and TROG-2 (no

more than 1 point off), thereby forming two control groups: KBIT-TD, and TROG-TD,

respectively. The inclusion of the two different measures of non-verbal and verbal abilities

allowed us to factor out the influence of general cognition and of general grammar ability on

12
participants’ performance on the particular syntactic structures under investigation. The TROG-

TD control group consisted of 14 children, while the KBIT-TD group had 13: one child with

autism scored particularly low on KBIT thus no match could be found for him among our typical

controls. Independent sample t-tests confirmed that there were no statistically significant

differences between the raw scores of the group with autism and either of the two control groups

on the relevant matching measure. Participants were closely matched for gender: this match was

exact in the autism vs. KBIT control group, and fairly close in the autism vs. TROG group,

where 11 out of 14 autistic participants were matched with controls for gender. All participants

were native speakers of standard American English dialect.

******INSERT TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE*****

Procedure

Comprehension of personal and reflexive pronouns was investigated with the aid of a two-choice

picture selection task, adapted from Wexler and Chien (1985). To make sure that all participants

understood the procedure, great care was taken to introduce the task, the characters used in the

experimental pictures (the Simpson’s family: Mom, Dad, Bart, Lisa and Maggie), and the verbs

depicting different actions used in the experimental sentences (dress, wash, point to and touch).

The task was first piloted with two children with autism and two children with Williams

syndrome, aged 3-6, all with varying degrees of intellectual impairment. A similar version of this

13
task, with the identical procedure but testing a different syntactic construction, was successfully

used in another experiment in our lab, with 198 TD children, aged 3-14. The pictures of the five

cartoon characters were introduced on the laptop screen individually, e.g. ‘This is Mom, this is

Dad, this is Lisa etc.’ followed by practice items which tested the child’s familiarity with each

one: the child would be asked to point to the character that matches the name uttered by the

experimenter (e.g. Lisa, while the screen shows two pictures, one of Lisa, one of Marge, Lisa’s

mom). This was followed by the introduction of four verbs used in the experimental pictures:

dress, wash, point to and touch, and finally, by two practice items involving simple transitive

constructions: ‘Mom kisses Dad’, ‘Bart holds Lisa’. The correct answers to all the practice items

and experimental items alternated between pictures presented on the left and right side of the

screen, to control for any visual bias. The task was administered to ten unimpaired adults whose

performance was at ceiling. All the controls and the 14 participants with autism (excluding the

aforementioned 4 participants with autism who were for this reason excluded) were able to

follow the task instructions and successfully completed the introductory items, before the

experimental probe was presented to them.

Stimuli

The probe consisted of two experimental conditions involving reflexive (Name Reflexive - NR)

and personal pronouns (Name Pronoun - NP) and two control conditions involving no pronouns

but just proper names (Control Possessive - CP, and Control Name - CN). The complete list of

sentences is provided in Table 2.

14
Possessive subjects (‘Bart’s dad’) were chosen over simple noun phrases (‘Homer’) since

possessive structure allows for two potential antecedents of the reflexive or pronoun in the

experimental conditions: the possessor NP ‘Bart’, and the entire subject NP consisting of the

possessor and possessee, ‘Bart’s dad’. This way, the child has the choice of two local

antecedents, one c-commanding the dependent, the other not.

Participants were asked to point to one of the two pictures presented on the laptop computer that

matched the sentence uttered by the experimenter. Thus a sentence ‘Bart’s dad is washing him’

(NP) would be accompanied by two pictures: picture A, depicting Homer, Bart’s dad, washing

himself, with Bart standing by, and picture B, the correct answer, where Homer is washing Bart.

*****INSERT TABLE 2 ABOUT HERE*****

The same two pictures would be used for the reflexive sentence (NR), ‘Bart’s dad is

washing himself’, where the correct answer is the aforementioned picture A. In the control

condition CP, which contained no pronominal elements, a sentence such as ‘Bart’s dad is petting

a dog’ would be accompanied by two pictures: picture A showing Bart petting a dog, and picture

B showing Homer, Bart’s dad, petting a dog (the correct answer). CP sentences tested whether

children knew the structure of possessive NP’s: whether they knew that the structure ‘Bart’s dad’

refers to Bart’s dad and not, say, to Bart, which is the first NP in the sentence. If children did

well on this control condition, then any problems they have with binding could not be the result

of misunderstanding the possessive structure. Furthermore, as is also the case for control

condition CN (to be described next), if children did well on this control condition, it shows that

15
they can perform well in this experiment when binding is not involved. Control condition CN

contained no possessive structures and no pronominal elements: e.g. the sentence ‘Dad is

pointing to Bart’ would be accompanied with picture A showing Homer, Bart’s dad, pointing to

Bart (the correct answer), and picture B showing Bart pointing to Homer, his dad.

There were eight sentences in each condition (two for each of the 4 verbs in the

experimental conditions), thus totaling 32 sentences. The order of sentences was automatically

randomized for each participant. The test took about 10 minutes to complete.

The majority of the participants with autism were tested in their homes, but several were

tested in their schools. Typically developing controls were all tested at their daycare centers or

after school clubs.

RESULTS

Since the outcome variable was binary, and involved repeated measures for each participant in

each of the three groups, the data were analysed using the Generalized Linear Mixed Model

(GLMM) function with a logit link (Gelman & Hill, 2007). Mixed logistic regression models

have been argued to be more suitable for analyzing data in psycholinguistic research than

commonly used repeated measures analyses of variance (e.g. Quene & van den Bergh, 2008;

Jaeger, 2008).

The fixed effects built into the model were Group (autism group and the two control groups:

KBIT-TD and TROG-TD), Sentence (NP, NR, CP and CN), and Group*Sentence interaction.6,7

16
The model revealed significant main effects of Group F(2, 152)=16.62, p<.001, Sentence Type

F(3, 152)=10.13, p<.001 and significant Group*Sentence Type interaction F(6, 152)=3.20,

p=.005. To investigate the Group*Sentence Type interaction, post hoc contrasts (Sidak

corrected) compared mean probability correct of each sentence type both between the groups and

within the groups. Variables were considered to be statistically significant at the adjusted level of

p=.05. Mean probabilities correct for each sentence type and each group are displayed in Figure

1.

*****INSERT FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE******

The significant Group*Sentence Type interaction indicates different patterns of performance

between the three participant groups. The performance of the two TD control groups did not

differ on any of the sentence types. All the differences observed concerned the performance of

the group with autism relative to that of the controls.

With regard to the control conditions, estimated mean probabilities correct of the group with

autism on CN (M=0.80, CI.95=0.70, 0.88) and CP (M=.77, CI.95=0.62, 0.87) were no different

from those of the TROG group: CN (M=0.89, CI.95 = 0.80, 0.94), t(152)=1.57, p=.224, and CP

(M= 0.86, CI.95 = 0.72, 0.93), t(152)=1.06, p=.455, respectively. The other control group, KBIT-

TD, had generally higher scores on the control conditions (CN: M=0.95, CI.95= 0.87, 0.98; CP:

M=0.93, CI.95=0.80, 0.98). The autism group’s performance on CN was significantly worse than

that of KBIT-TD controls, t(152)=2.88, p=.014; odds ratio=4.75, but only approached

significance on CP, t(152)=2.16, p=.093; odds ratio=3.97.

17
With regard to the experimental conditions, comparisons of mean probabilities revealed no

differences between the groups on NP (autism group M=0.67, CI.95=0.54, 0.74; KBIT-TD group

M=0.71, CI.95=0.60, 0.80; and TROG-TD group M=0.71, CI.95=0.61, 0.80): autism vs. KBIT-TD:

t(152)=1.02, p=.671, and autism vs. TROG-TD: t(152)=0.96, p=.671.

However, the performance of the autistic group on NR (M=0.43, CI.95=0.31, 0.55) was

significantly worse than those of both control groups (KBIT-TD M=0.92, CI.95=0.82, 0.97 and

TROG-TD M=0.83, CI.95=0.71, 0.90): autism group vs. KBIT group: t(152)=6.88, p<.001, odds

ratio = 15.24 and autism group vs. TROG group: t(152)=5.10, p<.001, odds ratio = 6.48.

The analysis also allowed for comparisons between the performances on the four different

sentence types for each group individually. Comparisons of mean probabilities correct between

the four sentence types within the autism group revealed the score on NR to be significantly

lower than that of every other sentence type: CP t(152)=3.76, p=.001; CN t(152)= 4.86, p<.001,

and NP t(152)= 2.65, p=.035. No other differences between sentence types in the autism group

were observed.

Within the KBIT-TD control group, the differences were significant between the NP and every

other sentence type: CP: t(152)= 3.45, p=.003, CN: t(152)= 4.29, p<.001; and NR: t(152)=3.46,

p=003. No other differences between sentence types were observed.

Within the TROG control group, the only statistically significant difference between means was

between NP and CN, t(152)= 3, p=.019.

18
That the autism group performed worse on the control condition CN, a simple SVO sentence,

than the KBIT-TD group, may raise concerns such as whether these children were able to

understand the task, and whether the main result, the extremely poor performance on NR of the

autism group, was due to those autistic children who showed difficulties with this control

condition. There were 5 children with autism who scored 5 out of 8 correct on this condition (all

other children, including all the controls, reach at least 6 out of 8 correct).8 Even when these 5

children are excluded and the analysis rerun, the results remain the same: the difference on NR is

the only observed difference between the autistic group and the two control groups (autism vs.

KBIT-TD t(132)=5.49, p<.001, and for autism vs. TROG-TD, t(132)=4.42, p<.001).

The control condition CP was crucial in revealing whether or not children understand the

notion of possessive structures, independently of their performance on pronouns or reflexives.

The children with autism showed a slightly lower but not statistically significantly different

performance from that of controls. There were several children overall who scored low on CP:

three autistic children (one eight year old who scored none of the possible 8 correct, one 17 year

old who got 3/8 correct, and one 6 year old who scored 5/8 correct) and four control children

(two four-and-a-half year olds who scored 4/8 correct, and two three-and-a-half year olds who

scored 5/8 correct). A separate analysis was run with all these children excluded, and results

were identical to those reported above: the autism group showed no difference from the controls

on any condition except NR (autism vs. KBIT-TD t(124)=6.10, p<.001, and for autism vs.

TROG-TD, t(124)=4, p<.001).

In order to get a better idea of the patterns revealed in the data on experimental conditions, we

also report the number of children who scored at least 6 out of 8 items correct on NR and NP

19
conditions in the autism group as opposed to the controls. On NR, only two children out of 14 in

the autism group passed the threshold of 6/8 correct (14% of the sample); the other 12 children

scored between 1 and 5 correct. In contrast, there were 23 out of the total of 27 control children

(85% of the sample) who reached at least 6/8 correct on NR; the other four control children all

scored 5/8 correct on this experimental condition. With regard to the NP condition, 15 control

children out of 27 (56% of the sample) scored 6/8 or more correct, whereas 5 out of 14 autistic

children (36% of the sample) did so. Note that the two children with autism mentioned above,

who showed the good performance on NR, also showed a poorer performance on NP (less than

6/8 correct) – a pattern parallel to TD controls. Their general language abilities, as reflected in

their scores on standardized tests, were in line with those of other children in the group (cf. Table

1 for average scores of the autism group on different standardized measures): both children had a

SS of 55 on TROG, and SSs of 50 and 58 on PPVT. On KBIT, the measure of non-verbal IQ,

one child’s SS was 63, and the other’s 84, the latter score almost in the average range. It is

unlikely however that the SS of 84 on KBIT contributed to this child’s ability to interpret

reflexives correctly: there were other autistic children whose standard scores on some of the

measures were also close to or even within the normal range (e.g. two children had KBIT SSs of

98 and 103, and three different children had PPVT SSs of 80, 80 and 87) but who still performed

poorly on the reflexive condition.

DISCUSSION

Here we summarize the patterns revealed in the performance of the group with autism and the

two groups of matched TD controls, and argue that the results of our sample of children with

20
autism signal the presence of a particular grammatical deficit in this population. We discuss a

possible account of this deficit and examine the general implications that these results have for

our understanding of the study of language in autism and the linguistic theory of binding.

The results shown by our TD controls are in line with those widely reported in the

literature for this CA range (3-9 year olds), as reviewed in earlier sections. Children in the older

control group, KBIT-TD (average age: 6), showed a worse performance on pronouns, NP

(M=0.71) and a very good performance on reflexives, NR (M=0.92), displaying a classic DPBE

pattern. The younger TROG-TD control group (average age: 4) showed no statistically

significant difference between their performance on the two conditions (NP: M=0.71, and NR:

M=0.83). The lack of differential performance on reflexives and pronouns in this control group

parallels the pattern reported in Ruigendijk et al (2010) for 3 year old Hebrew speakers and can

therefore be attributed to their young age. However, even these children’s performance on

pronouns was still worse than their performance on a control condition CN – thus for both

control groups, their only difficulty involved the experimental condition testing personal

pronouns, NP.

In contrast, the pattern demonstrated by the autism group revealed a persistent difficulty

with the experimental condition involving reflexives, NR. Comparing the results of the three

groups overall, the autism group performed significantly worse on NR than either of the TD

control groups: the estimated mean probability correct of children with autism on NR was

M=0.43, for the KBIT-TD it was M=0.92, and TROG-TD M=0.83. Crucially, on the NP

condition, their performance was no different from either of the control groups’.

Like the KBIT-TD group, the autism group also showed the difference between the NP

and NR, but crucially, this difference goes in the opposite direction: children with autism had

21
more difficulties with NR than with NP. Recall however that there were two autistic children

whose results followed the typical pattern of a DPBE: good performance on reflexives, but poor

on pronouns. Thus while the discussion here concerns the large majority of our sample,

individual variation needs to be kept in mind. Recall however, that there were no TD control

children who showed the atypical pattern, of a better performance on pronouns, and poorer on

reflexives.

Children with autism did relatively well on the test of possessive structures, CP, although

somewhat worse than the KBIT-TD controls, indicating that possessives seem within reach for

the majority of children with this disorder (a discussion on how this performance can relate to the

children’s performance on NR is provided below). Some individual variation also seems present

here, as there were three autistic children, along with 4 controls, who had difficulties interpreting

these sentences. Note that the poorer performance of these children did not affect the results,

since the same results were obtained even after these participants were excluded.

The performance of the autism group on the control CN condition was significantly

worse than that of KBIT-TD group. Since these are simple SVO sentences, whose purpose was

to ensure that autistic children are able to understand the task, one may wonder whether the

extremely poor performance of the autism group on NR was due to these autistic children who

showed difficulties with this particular control condition. We do not believe this is the case:

when the five children with autism who do less than well on this condition are excluded from the

analysis, the robust pattern remains: a significant difficulty with the interpretation of reflexives,

not present in the matched controls, and an observable but less severe difficulty with pronouns,

comparable to that seen in matched controls. Furthermore, since the autism group’s performance

on CN was no different from that of TROG-TD, the youngest group matched on grammar

22
comprehension, we attribute this result to general difficulties attending to the task in the autism

group.

How do the observed patterns match our predictions outlined earlier? Recall that

Prediction 1 stated that if only pragmatic, but not syntactic knowledge were affected, children

with autism should show difficulties interpreting personal but not reflexive pronouns. Such a

pattern would also be in line with the evidenced language delay in this population: if language

development follows the same path as in TD, but develops much slower, a pattern resembling the

DPBE, reported widely in the typical acquisition literature, was to be expected. Our data confirm

this prediction only with regard to pronouns: the observed difficulties with personal pronouns,

comparable to matched TD controls, seem in line both with the ‘delayed but normal’

characterisation of language development in autism as well as the reported pragmatic deficits

(the nature of these deficits will be discussed in more detail below). However, the extreme

difficulty with the reflexive pronouns observed in the data fits in better with Prediction 2 which

stated that if syntax were also affected in autism, in addition to pragmatics, our participants

should also show difficulties interpreting reflexive pronouns. The pattern of extreme difficulty

with reflexive pronouns cannot be explained by a mere delay in grammatical development in

autism: the disparity in the command of grammatical constraints governing pronouns as opposed

to reflexives, where Principle B is obeyed but Principle A violated, is not evidenced at any stage

of typical language development (see Perovic, 2004 for a review) and has in fact been observed

in other populations with known grammatical deficits, such as Down syndrome (Perovic, 2004;

2006, Ring & Clahsen, 2005).

23
 We argue that the difficulty in the interpretation of reflexives observed in the sample of

children with autism in this study signals an impairment that is purely syntactic in nature.

Reflexive binding is governed by Principle A of Binding Theory, thus we hypothesise that this

principle is missing, or is incorrectly represented, in the grammar of children with autism. In

particular, the c-command sub-part of Principle A is missing in the child with autism. If this is

the case, how is the anaphor interpreted? Recall that the subject, the possessive NP, contained

two potential antecedents for the reflexive. In sentences such as ‘Bart’s dad is washing himself’,

participants with autism tended to incorrectly interpret ‘himself’ as referring to Bart, choosing

the picture which shows Bart’s dad washing Bart. One could argue that children with autism rely

on some linear rule to interpret the reflexive. For instance, assume that the child with autism

interprets reflexives as relying on a rule such as ‘the antecedent of a reflexive is a preceding

noun phrase in the same clause’. Such a rule would in fact obtain the correct interpretation for

simple sentences involving the reflexive, i.e. ‘Mary points to herself’. However, their poor

performance on NR where the subject of the sentence is a possessive could be interpreted as

signaling that children with autism do not know the c-command part of Principle A: that the

antecedent of reflexive must c-command the reflexive. Presumably a child with such a rule could

choose either Bart or Bart’s dad as the antecedent of the reflexive in Bart’s dad is pointing to

himself. After all, they are both in the same clause as the reflexive.

The suggestion that children use such a linear rule raises two important issues. First, should the

existence of this linear rule be interpreted to mean that the child with autism is completely

missing the hierarchical rule of c-command? And second, why do our participants (with the

exception of three children, as reported earlier) interpret CP sentences correctly? 9

24
C-command is a structural notion, considered a primitive of grammar (Williams, 1980; Koster,

1987; Neeleman & van de Koot, 2002, though see other accounts which argue that the c-

command relation is a consequence of general syntactic operations, e.g. Hornstein, 2001; 2009).

Thus not having c-command at all would severely impede most grammatical and interpretive

understanding. For example, the subject-predicate relationship demands that the subject c-

command the predicate. In Lisa is driving a car, Lisa c-commands driving a car. As we have

pointed out, very little is known about the grammatical capacities of children with autism, so

many possibilities are open. We simply point out here, that not having c-command would be a

fairly devastating deficiency.

Turning to the second issue, the aim of the CP condition was to test the c-command relation

independently of binding – computing the subject-predicate relationship in these sentences

indicates that children with autism show sensitivity to c-command: ‘Lisa’s mom is driving the

car’ cannot be interpreted as ‘Lisa is driving the car’. The semantic relationship (possession)

between Lisa and mom is usually interpreted as the c-commanding NP being the possessor.

However, it could be argued that a linear strategy can also be used to interpret the CP sentences.

Assume that the child with autism interprets the second N as the head of possessive structure,

‘Bart’s dad’ – this would always result in the correct interpretation of possessive sentences. If the

children also have the (wrong) linear rule for the interpretation of reflexives, where the

antecedent of a reflexive is a preceding noun in the same clause, such a grammar would predict

children’s good performance on CP, but poor or chance performance in NR.

Assuming that children with autism lack c-command altogether, yet can understand

simple transitive sentences (as we see in our study) and can understand the possessive

relationship (as we see in our study) seems to implicate the existence of several different kinds of

25
linear rules. We have seen the need for a particular two of these, one for the possessive, one for

the reflexive. While this is conceivable, we would have to explain how a child creates such a set

of linear rules. It is not entirely obvious how this could be done, but we will leave this matter of

learnability here, for future study.

Thus, while we are hesitant to argue that c-command in general is missing in the grammar of

autism, as this would imply a devastating deficit in this population, we settle for a more

conservative hypothesis: we argue that children with autism do not show sensitivity to c-

command in establishing the complex syntactic dependency of binding, where the antecedent of

a reflexive must c-command the reflexive.

Support for the idea that the ability to establish complex syntactic dependencies may be

compromised in autism comes from recent reports that complex syntactic operations involved in

the formation of passive and raising structures may also be affected in children and teenagers

with autism (Perovic et al, 2007). One theoretical proposal suggests that binding should be

reduced to a movement analysis (Hornstein, 2001). Since there are indications that children with

autism have difficulties with raising constructions (such as ‘John seems to Mary to be driving a

car’, which involve movement of the subject ‘John’ from the subject position in the embedded

clause to the subject position in the main clause) (Perovic et al, 2007), in addition to binding, it

may seem as if the child with autism has difficulties with argument movement. This theory

however would have to find a way to account for why raising and binding are distinguished in

other populations e.g. typical development (Hirsch & Wexler, 2007), Williams syndrome

(Perovic & Wexler, 2007), where binding much precedes raising.10

26
 To shed more light on the actual difficulties with reflexives in the grammar of autism, it

would be relevant to investigate binding in those languages which show a contrast between

‘strong’ and ‘weak’ reflexive elements (zich vs. zichzelf in Dutch, sich vs. sich selbst in German,

or the reflexive clitic se vs. the full reflexive sebe in Serbo-Croatian). Perovic (2004; 2008)

reports results of Serbian adolescents with Down syndrome who showed difficulties with the full

reflexive sebe, but not with the reflexive clitic se, arguing that this is due to their inability to

establish the syntactic relation of binding between the full reflexive and its antecedent. These

participants were however able to understand inherently reflexive predicates which can only

appear with the clitic, and not with the full reflexive. It has been argued that other theories of

binding, such as Reinhart & Reuland (1993), or Reuland (2001), may be better equipped to deal

with the different types of reflexive elements in these languages than the standard binding theory

of Chomsky (1986) (see Perovic, 2004; 2006, Ring & Clahsen, 2005 for details). However,

further research is needed, with a larger number of participants, to establish the exact nature of

the violations of the syntactic principles guiding the interpretation of reflexives in autism.

On the general level, our data have interesting implications for the linguistic theory of

binding: they provide evidence that the constraints regulating reflexives and pronouns are

different in nature (i.e. there is a difference in how children with autism treat reflexives as

opposed to pronouns), or to put it differently, that the fractionation of binding into syntactic and

non-syntactic components is real (Reinhart, 1983). The well established result of a difficulty with

personal pronouns but not reflexives in the typical acquisition literature, the DPBE phenomenon,

proves this fractionation in one direction: it is the pragmatic/processing constraint that is difficult

to apply for the TD children who then cannot rule out illicit coreference of pronouns. The pattern

27
revealed here provides evidence for this fractionation in the opposite direction: children with

autism cannot apply the constraint that falls within syntax proper. However, while our data

demonstrate a pattern reminiscent of the DPBE in our sample of children with autism, it is not

immediately obvious how and whether these results can help us decide whether the extra-

syntactic constraint governing illicit coreference of pronouns is pragmatic or processing in

nature, since opposing arguments have been provided in the literature (cf. Chien & Wexler,

1990, vs. Grodzinsky & Reinhart, 1993). Further research is needed to establish whether autistic

children’s performance would differ on quantified as opposed to non-quantified antecedents, the

issue crucial in these accounts. If TD children’s difficulties with personal pronouns are due to

their inability to block illicit coreference, which in turn is a result of their immature pragmatic

abilities, one might expect children with autism, in view of their reported pragmatic deficits, to

find the interpretation of personal pronouns extraordinarily difficult, even more so than the TD

controls. One option would be to consider the possibility that pragmatic abilities involved in

ruling out illicit coreference in TD populations are different in nature to those pragmatic abilities

which are affected in autism. Children with autism, for example, are known to have difficulties

assigning reference to speakers as opposed to addressees, e.g. ‘I’ vs. ‘you’, or between the third

person, e.g. ‘Mary’, and the first person, ‘I’. However, when an action is directed towards only

one 3rd person referent in the discourse, the difficulty in assigning reference is greatly reduced –

the interpretative complexity of determining whether that object is reflexive or non-reflexive is

greatly reduced. Again, further research is needed in this domain.

An important issue to consider is how general verbal and non-verbal abilities may have

influenced the results of our group with autism. It is interesting to note that the autism group

28
performed worse than either of the two control TD groups on reflexives – revealing that neither

of the two measures: non-verbal MA nor the general comprehension of grammar, were reliable

predictors of our participants’ knowledge of this subtle aspect of grammar. Though non-verbal

abilities, as measured by KBIT Matrices, seemed stronger than their verbal abilities, our

participants with autism still performed worse than the much younger TD controls matched on

this measure, which suggests the observed deficit cannot be due to a general cognitive deficit in

the population with autism. Furthermore, they performed worse than even the TD controls

matched on TROG, indicating that the deficit in the interpretation of reflexives is more severe

than the general grammatical deficit in this population would suggest. Clearer insights into the

relation between general cognitive abilities and the knowledge of this particular aspect of

grammar can only be obtained by comparisons of different populations with known intellectual

impairments. While this study focussed on the population with autism only, results from studies

on other developmental disorders reveal different patterns, suggesting that comprehension of

reflexive and personal pronouns is independent from non-verbal as well as verbal MA. It has

been shown that children and adults with Down syndrome also have difficulties with the

interpretation of reflexive pronouns (Perovic, 2004; 2006; Ring & Clahsen, 2005), in contrast to

children and adolescents with Williams syndrome, who demonstrate a good comprehension of

both reflexives and pronouns (Clahsen & Almazan, 1998; Ring & Clahsen, 2005; Perovic &

Wexler, 2007, but see Perovic & Wexler 2007 for indications of a ‘DPBE’ in younger children

with WS). Crucially, a recent study suggests that even when matched on CA, intellectual and

verbal ability, children with autism perform worse than children with Williams syndrome on

reflexives, but not on pronouns (Perovic, Modyanova & Wexler, 2009). Why binding should be

vulnerable in two disorders as different as Down syndrome and autism remains to be answered.

29
CONCLUSIONS

The results from the first experimental investigation of binding in the population with autism

reported here reveal two clear patterns. Children with autism showed some difficulties

interpreting personal pronouns (a ‘Delay of Principle B Effect’), but these were no different from

the TD controls functioning at similar levels of verbal and non-verbal abilities, in line with the

reported language delays and pragmatic deficits in this population. They did however show

significant difficulties interpreting reflexives, significantly worse than either of the two groups of

controls, matched on non-verbal MA or receptive grammar. Since for the interpretation of

reflexives, the syntactic relation between the reflexive element and its antecedent is crucial – in

contrast to pronouns, which are interpreted by invoking extra-syntactic mechanisms – the pattern

suggests a deficit that is syntactic in nature. This pattern is not seen in typical development, but

has been evidenced in other populations with syntactic impairments, i.e. Down syndrome

(Perovic, 2004; 2006; Ring & Clahsen, 2005). The observed pattern is in contrast to the

traditional view that there is a pragmatic, but not a syntactic deficit in autism, since such a view

predicts problems with pronouns, but not with reflexives. Despite individual variability in our

participants with autism, the observed deficiency of children with autism on a complex aspect of

grammar such as binding and reports of other deficiencies on passives and raising, suggest that

grammatical development in autism may be qualitatively different from that of typical

development. While further studies with greater participant numbers are needed, these data

contribute to a more comprehensive picture of the knowledge of complex grammar in autism, an

area of research severely neglected in the literature.

30
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research was supported by the Anne and Paul Marcus Family Foundation, the Brain

Development and Disorders Project (BDDP) Postdoctoral Award to the first author, and the

Brain Infrastructure Grant Program to the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences,

Massachusetts Institute of Technology from the Simons Initiative on Autism. We would like to

thank all the participants and their families for taking part, and to the Autism Resource Center of

Central Massachusetts and Children’s Hospital, Boston, for help with recruiting. We also thank

Lee Mavros-Rushton, the coordinator of BDDP, and all the students in the Wexler Lab for help

with collecting data, Gordon Craig, Christopher Hirsch, Vikki Janke and Ad Neeleman for

helpful discussions, and audiences at the 31st Boston University Conference on Language

Development (BUCLD), November 2006; Autism Research UK (ARUK), Open University,

May, 2007; Symposium on Research on Child Language Disorders (SRCLD), University of

Wisconsin Madison, 2007; Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition Conference

(GALA), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, September 2007; and Symposia on Innovative

Research in Autism (IRIA), Tours, France, in April 2009, where some of the findings were

presented.

31
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Notes

1
See Reuland and Everart (2001) for a critique of the standard framework and Hornstein (2001), Reuland (2001) for
alternative accounts of binding.
2
Binding: X binds Y if X c-commands Y and is coreferential with Y (see the next footnote for more on
coreference). C-command is a structural relationship between constituents: a noun phrase X c-commands a noun
phrase Y if the first branching node that dominates X also dominates Y (X dominates Y if it is "higher up" in a
syntactic tree). C-command is a core grammatical relationship pertinent to our understanding of how binding and
reference work in natural language, but also to other crucial syntactic phenomena, e.g. movement. For present
purposes, local can mean "in the same clause as".
3
There are two ways that a pronoun can have the same referent as a noun phrase. A very pervasive way is for a
pronoun to "pick up" its referent from an antecedent, typically uttered in the discourse (though sometimes the
discourse is wider than the current situation). This is, perhaps, most obvious when the pronoun is clearly a
"variable." In the sentence ‘Every woman in the class thought she would do well’, the pronoun she picks up its
referent from every woman, varying in reference with each woman in the set denoted by every woman in the class:
e.g. ‘Susan thought she (Susan) would do well’, ‘Mary thought she (Mary) would do well’, etc. But even in a
sentence like ‘Mary thought that she would do well’, the pronoun she picks up its referent from an antecedent
(Mary). We think of the pronoun in all these cases as being "bound" to its antecedent; it picks up its referent from
the antecedent. Principle B applies to this type of relationship.
On the other hand, a pronoun may corefer with another noun phrase "accidentally." The pronoun doesn't "pick up"
its referent from the other noun phrase; rather the pronoun and the noun phrase just happen to refer to the same
person or thing. Consider a discourse like, ‘That guy must be John. At least he looks like him.’ Here the pronoun
him picks up its reference from the noun phrase John, so it corefers with John. But him also is coreferential with the
noun phrase that guy. The speaker is asserting that that guy is John, and him, which is coreferential with John also
must be coreferential with that guy. This relationship is not one of "picking up reference", rather it is what is called
“accidental coreference”. Him corefers with that guy, but doesn't pick up its referent from it. This is a relationship of
coreference, but not a bound variable relationship. Similarly he and him in the 2nd sentence of the discourse are
coreferential, but neither picks up its referent from the other; they are coreferential, but there is no bound variable
relationship between them. Principle B does not apply to this relationship, so he and him in the 2nd sentence corefer,
he locally c-commands him, yet Principle B does not apply to make this sentence ungrammatical, since there is no
bound variable relationship between he and him.
4
While this is the prevalent view in the literature, (i.e. see Guasti, 2002, for a review), other accounts have also been
proposed; e.g. see Hendriks & Spenader (2005/2006) for an account couched in the Optimality Theory framework.
5
See Grodzinsky and Reinhart (1993) for an argument that the observed pattern is due to an error in syntactic
processing: the failure of Rule I (preserving the Chien and Wexler proposal about the distinction in children’s
behavior between bound variable and coreferential pronouns). See Thornton and Wexler (1999) for a response to
that suggestion, defending Wexler and Chien's (1985) original ‘pragmatic’ hypothesis.
6
Matching did not create a dependency between the scores across the groups, and hence the groups can be treated as
independent. Consequently, Match is not included as a random effect.
7
It is possible that the four verbs used here could have elicited different responses in our participants. It has been
argued (Everaert, 1986) that wash and dry belong to the group of verbs that are ambiguous between inherently
reflexive and regular transitive verbs - when inherently reflexive, these verbs can be used without the reflexive
pronoun: “I wash every day”, and when regular transitive verbs, they are ‘reflexivized’ by the presence of the
reflexive “I wash myself everyday’ (Reuland & Reinhart, 1993). The other two verbs, touch and point to are regular
transitive verbs and cannot be used without the reflexive in reflexive contexts. Note however that different uses of
wash and dry are rarely observed in everyday American English. Crucially, Wexler & Chien (1985) found little
variability between children’s performance on these same four verbs. While it seems unlikely that the children here
treated wash and dry differently from touch and point to in reflexive contexts, this issue should still be considered in
future studies and verb included as a random effect in the model.
8
We assume a cutoff point of 6/8 (75%) correct as indicating that the structure has been mastered, in line with
Hirsch & Wexler (2007), who used a similar experimental methodology to test raising structures in TD children
aged 3-9 years. This of course may not be conservative enough, but notice that raising the cutoff point to 7/8 or 8/8
correct would result in eliminating a greater number of autistic children. Using a larger number of items per
condition in this type of experimental design may be a solution in future studies, however, other requirements have

39
to be taken into consideration, such as the generally shorter attention span of the child with autism, the number of
experimental tasks researchers can carry in a single experimental session etc.
9
Note that the error in CP was that the child chooses the wrong syntactic subject (Bart instead of Bart’s dad),
whereas the error in NR is that the child chooses the wrong referent of the syntactic object, namely “himself” to
refer to Bart instead of Bart’s dad. The relations of subject and object (agent, patient) are depicted in the picture. If
the child chose the wrong subject (Bart instead of Bart’s dad) in the NR case, it just makes neither of the two
pictures fit the sentence, since both of them have Bart’s dad doing the action. This might lead to chance performance
(guessing behaviour) but it would also predict chance performance on NP, and we have seen that children with
autism perform significantly better on NR than NP. Thus there are two reasons why we don’t think that performance
on possessives predicts the poor performance on reflexives: the good performance on CP and the significantly better
performance of NP compared to NR.
10
For discussion on how other components of Hornstein’s analysis, the movement analysis of the construction of
‘control structures’ fare in typical language acquisition, see Hirsch and Wexler (2007).

40
Table 1. Ages and mean scores (standard deviations) on standardized tests of language and

cognition for the group with autism and two control groups

Group AUTISM KBIT-TD TROG-TD

n=14 n=13 n=14

Age in months 133.63 (43.36) 71.31 (20.12) 49.79 (6.93)

Age range in months 78-206 48-112 40-60

KBIT Composite SS 64.38 (20.55)

KBIT Vocabulary SS 67 (22.59)

KBIT Matrices SS 65.93 (20.37) 100.00 (6.76)

KBIT Matrices RS 15.93 (5.86) 16.85 (4.58)

PPVT-III SS 56.57 (15.81)

PPVT-III RS 67.50 (16.26)

TROG-2 SS 56.50 (4.05) 99.91 (9.92)

TROG-2 RS 3.57 (2.76) 3.64 (2.71)

Note. The scores for the measures on which participants with autism were matched to controls

are in bold. RS=raw score, SS=standard score.

41
Table 2. Complete list of sentences in each test condition

1. Name Reflexive (NR) Bart's dad is touching himself.

Lisa's mom is touching herself.
Bart's dad is pointing to himself.
Lisa's mom is pointing to herself.
Bart's dad is washing himself.
Maggie's mom is washing herself.
Maggie's mom is dressing herself.
Lisa's mom is dressing herself.

2. Name Pronoun (NP) Bart's dad is touching him.

Lisa's mom is touching her.
Bart's dad is pointing to him.
Lisa's mom is pointing to her.
Bart's dad is washing him.
Maggie's mom is washing her.
Maggie's mom is dressing her.
Lisa's mom is dressing her.

3. Control Name (CN) Bart is pointing to Dad.

Lisa is touching Mom.
Bart is washing Dad.
Mom is dressing Maggie.
Dad is pointing to Bart.
Mom is touching Lisa.
Mom is washing Maggie.
Mom is dressing Lisa.

4. Control Possessive (CP) Lisa's mom is waving a flag.

Bart's dad is petting a dog.
Maggie's mom is petting a dog.
Lisa's mom is driving a car.
Lisa's mom is playing with blocks.
Bart's dad is eating an ice-cream.
Maggie's mom is eating an ice-cream.

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 Figure 1. Results.

43

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