Abstract
Although the use of pronouns has been extensively investigated in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), most studies have focused on English, and no study to date has investigated the use of subject pronouns in null subject languages. The present study aims to fill this gap by investigating the use of subject and object pronouns in 5- to 8-year-old Greek-speaking high-functioning children with ASD compared to individually matched typically developing age and language controls. The “Frog where are you” (Mayer, 1969) narrative task was used to elicit subject and object pronouns as well as Determiner Phrases (DPs). Greek is a null subject language, and as a result, subject pronouns most often remain without phonological content. The findings showed that both groups used more null than overt subject pronouns, indicating that children with ASD know that Greek is a null subject language. TD children used more null subjects than subject DPs, whereas children with ASD used an equal proportion of null subjects and subject DPs. In terms of object pronouns, both groups produced more clitics and object DPs than strong object pronouns, but the difference between clitics and DPs did not reach significance in either of the groups. Importantly, the groups did not differ from each other in the use of ambiguous pronouns in both the subject and object position. The ASD children’s avoidance to use pronominal subjects can be taken as evidence that they use a strategy to avoid infelicitous reference. This would suggest that the ASD children’s difficulties with pronouns is not due to difficulties in core grammar.
Highlights
The use of pronouns is a domain that has triggered a considerable amount of research in the context of individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD)
To address differences between the two groups using inferential statistics, a mixed ANOVA with group (ASD, typically developing (TD)) as a between group factor, subject type as a within group factor, and Raven’s as a co-variable showed no significant main effect of Type, Group, or Raven’s, no significant interaction between Type and Raven’s, but there was a significant interaction between Group and Type [F(2, 74) = 3.849, p = 0.026, η2 = 0.094], demonstrating that the two groups showed a different pattern of performance
Both groups used massively more null than overt subject pronouns, indicating that children with ASD know that Greek is a null-subject language
Summary
The use of pronouns is a domain that has triggered a considerable amount of research in the context of individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). In particular, the clitic object pronouns of Greek, were investigated by Terzi et al (2017) Both studies did not find important differences on object pronouns between children with ASD and their typical controls, but they attribute the similar performance of the two groups to different reasons. Novogrodsky and Edelson (2016) suspect that the finding may be a consequence of the small body of the object pronoun data that constituted their sample, while Terzi et al (2017) attribute the similar performance of children with ASD and their typical controls to the fact that the TD children were too young to have fully mastered the referential abilities of these pronouns, as supported by the fact that they had several infelicitous cases of pronouns.
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