Arabic is characterized by diglossia, which involves the use of two language varieties within a single speech community: Spoken Arabic (SpA) for everyday speech and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) for formal speech and reading/writing. Earlier research suggests that some Arabic-speaking children with Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) might favor MSA…

Background: Deficits in the ability to use language in social contexts, including storytelling skills, are observed across the autism spectrum. Development in machine-learning approaches may contribute to clinical psychology and psychiatry, given its potential to support decisions concerning the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric conditions…

Previous research suggests that Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) might be associated with impairments on implicit but not explicit mentalizing tasks. However, such comparisons are made difficult by the heterogeneity of stimuli and the techniques used to measure mentalizing capabilities. We tested the abilities of 34 individuals (17 with ASD) to…

Autobiographical accounts and a limited research literature suggest that adults with autism spectrum disorders can experience difficulties with decision-making. We examined whether some of the difficulties they describe correspond to quantifiable differences in decision-making when compared to adults in the general population. The participants (38…

This study tested whether individuals with autism spectrum conditions (n = 23) show enhanced discrimination of acoustic differences that signal a linguistic contrast (i.e., /g/ versus /k/ as in "goat" and "coat") and whether they process such differences in a less categorical fashion as compared with 23 IQ-matched typically…

Understanding that people's ideas may be false is a challenging step in Theory of Mind (ToM) development, which is accomplished around the age of 4-5 years old by typically developing (TD) children. False-belief attribution remains difficult beyond this age for certain clinical populations, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), where delays in…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) present difficulties in forming relations among items and context. This capacity for relational binding is also involved in spatial navigation and research on this topic in ASD is scarce and inconclusive. Using a computerised version of the Morris Water Maze task, ASD participants showed particular…

We investigated "scalar implicature" in adolescents and children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to test whether theory of mind deficits associated with autism affect pragmatic inferences in language. We tested scalar implicature computation in adolescents with ASD (12-18 years) and asked whether they reason about mental states when…

Purpose: To investigate sensitivity to prosodic and semantic cues to emotion in individuals with high-functioning autism (HFA). Method: Emotional prosody and semantics were independently manipulated to assess the relative influence of prosody versus semantics on speech processing. A sample of 10-year-old typically developing children (n = 10) and…

Analogical reasoning is an important mechanism for social cognition in typically developing children, and recent evidence suggests that some forms of analogical reasoning may be preserved in autism spectrum disorder. An unanswered question is whether children with autism spectrum disorder can apply analogical reasoning to social information. In…

Children with autism spectrum disorder present with a variety of social communication deficits such as atypicalities in social gaze and verbal and non-verbal communication delays as well as perceptuo-motor deficits like motor incoordination and dyspraxia. In this study, we had the unique opportunity to study praxis performance in deaf children…