• Biomedical Science Letters
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.362-371
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• 2017

The purpose of this study is to investigate difficulties in using prosodic information to identify the meaning of ambiguous sentences in children with high functioning autism (HFA). Fifteen high functioning autistic children and fifteen children who matched their chronological age (CA) participated in this study. We compared the performance of the two groups by conducting syntactically and affectively ambiguous sentence comprehension (SASC and AASC) tasks. The results of this study show that in both tasks, the difference between the two groups was statistically significant at each condition and the performance of high functioning autistic children was significantly lower. In a correlation analysis of major variables, children who matched CA showed a correlation between prosody-only (PO) and AASC, while children with HFA showed a correlation between PO and MO (morpheme-only). Children with HFA used grammatical morpheme information to understand general sentences. We found that the ability to use prosodic information in children with HFA is significantly lower than that of normally developed children. Considering the relevance of prosody to linguistic, non-linguistic and emotional aspects of communication, improving prosodic perception is thought to be a way to mediate deficits in the comprehension of ambiguous sentences in children with HFA.