Negative Sentence Comprehension of Korean Children with High Functioning Autism

Lee, Hee Ran; Kim, Young-Tae; Lee, Seungbok

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2007;12(4): 643-661.

Hee Ran Lee^` , Young-Tae Kim^` , and Seungbok Lee^`

이희란(Hee Ran Lee)| 김영태(Young-Tae Kim)| 이승복(Seungbok Lee)

ABSTRACT

Background & Objectives
The purposes of this study were to identify the characteristics of presupposition in children with high fU llCtioning autism (HFA) and to examine the mechanisms of their negative sentence comprehension which require presuppositional skill as a pragmatic abili ty.
Methods
Fony children panicipmed in this study: 20 children with HFA were between ages 6.0- 8.1 1 years and the other 20 were normal children matched on the language age with the HFA group (LA cantrol group). In this study, we used the forced-choice task to examine the mechanisms of the comprehens ion o( negative sentences which were presented with presupposit ional context. The experimenl consisted of two conditions: First, the particles conditions were subjective particle 'ilia!' marking, topic-contrastive particle '(n)un' mark 109, and empty marking. Second, the word order conditions. consisted of normal word order versus reverse word order. The responses were counted according to the categories of negation (agent negation, object negation, and action negarion) and the latency of the responses was a lso measured.
Results
The principal findings of thi s study were as follows: (1) In the HF A group, when the negative sentences were presented as given informa tion, the responses were more action-oriented. In contrast, the agent-c ha n~ed pictures were chosen more :frequently in the LA control group. In the topic-contrastive particle (n)un ' marking condition, the o bj ect-negated 1?icmres were selected more as their comprehension in the HF A group compared to the other condillons, and (2) The response latency in the HFA group was significantly longer than the LA controls. The HF A group needed less time to respond to the topic-contrastive particle '(n)un' marking condition than the other conditions. The response time ofthe HF A group in the two-word o rder cond itions showed no significant di ffere nces compared with the LA controls. DiSCll$sion & Conclll$ion: The resu lt of this study shows that c hildren with HFA may suffer some trouble in comprehending negative sentences because of their difficu lry with presuppositional skills. The implication ofibis study might be that for Korean-speaking chIldren with HFA, the particle '(n)un' marking must be more careru lly considered than empty marking or subj ective particles markmg in their fo rmation of negative sentences.