Language in autism: domains, profiles and co-occurring conditions.

This article reviews the current knowledge state on pragmatic and structural language abilities in autism and their potential relation to extralinguistic abilities and autistic traits. The focus is on questions regarding autism language profiles with varying degrees of (selective) impairment and with respect to potential comorbidity of autism and language impairment: Is language impairment in autism the co-occurrence of two distinct conditions (comorbidity), a consequence of autism itself (no comorbidity), or one possible combination from a series of neurodevelopmental properties (dimensional approach)? As for language profiles in autism, three main groups are identified, namely, (i) verbal autistic individuals without structural language impairment, (ii) verbal autistic individuals with structural language impairment, and (iii) minimally verbal autistic individuals. However, this tripartite distinction hides enormous linguistic heterogeneity.

Fast but Not Furious. When Sped Up Bit Rate of Information Drives Rule Induction.

The language abilities of young and adult learners range from memorizing specific items to finding statistical regularities between them () and generalizing rules to novel instances (). Both external factors, such as input variability, and internal factors, such as cognitive limitations, have been shown to drive these abilities. However, the exact dynamics between these factors and circumstances under which rule induction emerges remain largely underspecified.

Learning and generalizing non-adjacent dependencies in 18-month-olds: A mechanism for language acquisition?

The ability to track non-adjacent dependencies (the relationship between ai and bi in an aiXbi string) has been hypothesized to support detection of morpho-syntactic dependencies in natural languages ('The princess is reluctantly kissing the frog'). But tracking such dependencies in natural languages entails being able to generalize dependencies to novel contexts ('The general is angrily berating his troops'), and also tracking co-occurrence patterns between functional morphemes like is and ing (a class of elements that often lack perceptual salience). We use the Headturn Preference Procedure to investigate (i) whether infants are capable of generalizing dependencies to novel contexts, and (ii) whether they can track dependencies between perceptually non-salient elements in an artificial grammar aXb.

Gleaning Structure from Sound: The Role of Prosodic Contrast in Learning Non-adjacent Dependencies.

The ability to detect non-adjacent dependencies (i.e. between a and b in aXb) in spoken input may support the acquisition of morpho-syntactic dependencies (e.