Boys with autism demonstrate surprising strength in grammar processing

Autism is often characterized by language and communication deficits. Yet a study by neuroscientists found that boys with high-functioning autism were significantly faster at a key task of grammar abilities - producing past tenses for regular verbs - than were boys without autism.

The findings, published in Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, suggest a surprising strength in language use in children with autism, says Michael Ullman, PhD, director of the brain and language laboratory at Georgetown University Medical Center, and senior author on the study.

"We had not expected this interesting finding. It makes us wonder whether some children with autism might also show related strengths, as yet unrecognized," says Ullman.

"This notion is consistent with an emerging way of thinking that some disorders, especially those that occur during development, provide strengths as well as weaknesses," adds Matthew Walenski, PhD, of Northwestern University, the first author on the study.

In this study, 20 boys (ages 7 to 13) diagnosed with high-functioning autism and a control group of 25 typically developing boys were asked to produce past tenses of verbs. The boys with autism were significantly faster than the control group at producing regular past tenses, which end in -ed, as in step-stepped or made-up verbs like plag-plagged. However, they were no faster than the control group at producing irregular past tenses, like sing-sang or for made-up verbs like spling-splang.

"This is a simple and elegant test of the basic building blocks of language," Ullman says. "Processing regular past tenses reflects our grammatical abilities that are critical for understanding and producing sentences, while irregular forms are simply stored in our mental dictionary alongside words like cat. The results suggest that children with high-functioning autism may show speeded processing of grammar, while this pattern might not hold for at least some stored words.

"These grammatical abilities appear to depend on the procedural memory system - implicit memory that we use to learn and perform cognitive and motor skills such as playing video games and driving," Ullman adds. "We don't know if the increased speed we saw in processing regular past tenses in children with high-functioning autism affects other aspect of procedural memory, but we are excited to explore that possibility."

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