How Autistic Children Define Novel and Real Words

Authors

Abstract

Word knowledge is highly valuable to Autistic individuals, and although much research has characterized Autistic children’s vocabulary breadth (i.e., the number of lexical entries), less attention has been paid to vocabulary depth (i.e., the richness with which one understands a given word). In this exploratory post-hoc study, 11 Autistic children (one assigned female at birth) participated in novel and real word learning paradigms in which child-friendly referents were paired with CVCV word forms. Participants were then asked to provide open-ended definitions of the words. Definitions were parsed into meaningful subunits, or semantic features. Semantic features were coded by type of meaning expressed (i.e., perceptual, functional, materialistic, categorical, thematic, narrative, and ‘other’). Results indicated that participants produced more features for real words than novel words. Perceptual and semantic features predominated in definitions of both real and novel words, although functional features also predominated in definitions of real words. Expressive vocabulary size was associated with more features produced for novel, but not real, words. These results suggest that Autistic children increase their vocabulary depth by aggregating experiences across developmental time. Suggestions for stakeholders are discussed.

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