The Ability to Use Syntax in School-Aged Asperger’s Syndrome Children in a Story-Retelling Task

Kwon, Eugene

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2010;15(2): 193-204.

Eugene Kwon^`

권유진(Eugene Kwon)

ABSTRACT

Background&Objectives
Asperger’s syndrome(AS) is a disorder characterized by autistic social deficit and subtle communication impairment. There is no history of language delay or mental retardation in the course of their early development. Despite these diagnostic criteria, numerous studies have shown that the children are limited in their social-emotional and communicative competences. Story-retelling task is one of the most useful tools for assessing complex sentence expression ability. This study addresses the abilities to use syntax expression in school-aged individuals with AS in Korea.
Methods
Sixteen AS and 32 normal children were asked to retell a story from a wordless picture book ‘Frog, where are you?’(Mayer, 1969). The 32 normal children were divided evenly into two groups: a receptive language-matched normal group (language-matched) and a percent of story grammar-matched normal group (story-matched). The children’s syntactic abilities were analyzed by the total number of C-units, the total number of subordinate clauses, and the mean number of clauses in a C-unit that were contained in their retold stories.
Results
For all variables, AS children showed more limited abilities than two normal children groups, except the total number of C-units.
Discussion & Conclusion
This result implies the syntactic expression ability of AS children is lower than normal children although the ability of receptive language or story retelling are similar each other. Therefore, complex sentence expression should be an important consideration for language assessment and intervention in school-aged children with Asperger’s syndrome

Keywords: 아스퍼거증후군 | C-unit(Communication unit) | 종속절 | 부사절 | 명사절 | 관형절 | 인용절