Personal Pronoun Comprehension in Addressed and Non-Addressed Situations in Autistic and Nonautistic Preschoolers

This research paper explores the role of speaker, listener and real-time social attention for pronoun comprehension in autistic and nonautistic children in the northeast United States. We assessed the pronoun comprehension of 22 autistic children (average age of 62 months, range 46–80 months) and 22 nonautistic children (average age 44 months, range 30–57 months) matched on expressive vocabulary scores. We evaluated the first- and second-person possessive pronoun comprehension (“my” and “your”) using a game in which two experimenters hid stickers and provided clues to their location by providing a verbal clue (e.g. “It’s in your box”) with accompanying gaze to the addressee. We also coded each child’s gaze to the speaker during the pronoun comprehension task. Findings suggest that both autistic and nonautistic children comprehend first- and second-person pronouns at levels above chance. Nonautistic children performed better at comprehending second-person pronouns than autistic children. For both groups, children were more accurate in their comprehension of the second-person pronoun “your” when it referred to themselves versus when it referred to the experimenter; errors more commonly reflected “self-bias” rather than pronoun reversal errors. Children who gazed at the speaker performed better in comprehending second-person pronouns than children who did not. Our results reveal considerable overlap in the strengths and challenges of young language learners with and without autism. Our findings suggest that children may benefit from repeated experiences across varied conversational settings–including addressed and non-addressed speech–to practice the synchronization of semantics and pragmatics in their ongoing mastery of language.