title: Associative learning of pictures and words by low-functioning children with autism.
abstract: This research investigates whether children with autism learn picture, word and object relations as associative pairs or whether they understand such relations as referential. In Experiment 1, children were taught a new word (e.g. ;whisk') repeatedly paired with a novel picture. When given the picture and a previously unseen real whisk and asked to indicate a whisk, children with autism, unlike typically developing peers matched on receptive language, associated the word with the picture rather than the object. Subsequent experiments respectively confirmed that neither a bias for selecting pictures nor perseverative responding accounted for these results. Taken together, these results suggest that children with autism with cognitive difficulties are learning picture-word and picture-object relations via an associative mechanism and have difficulty understanding the symbolic nature of pictures.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK. melissa.allen@lancaster.ac.uk
authors.forename: Melissa Allen
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Preissler
mesh_terms: D001245:Association Learning; D001321:Autistic Disorder / Q000523:psychology / Q000628:therapy*; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D032882:Comprehension; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007360:Intelligence; D007805:Language Development Disorders / Q000523:psychology / Q000628:therapy*; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D013561:Symbolism; D014706:Verbal Learning