Sentence Production and Sentence Repetition in Autistic Adolescents and Young Adults: Linguistic Sensitivity to Finiteness Marking.

Researchers studied how well autistic teenagers and young adults could produce and repeat sentences. They compared those with language difficulties to those without. The group with language difficulties scored lower on both tasks, especially in producing grammatically correct sentences. The study found that a specific scoring method could help identify language problems in autistic individuals without being affected by natural language differences.

This study examined sentence production and repetition abilities in 31 autistic adolescents and adults, comparing those with language impairment (ALI, n=15) to those without (ASD, n=16). Researchers applied 'strategic scoring' methods to language assessment tasks, focusing on sensitivity to finiteness marking (grammatical structures indicating tense and agreement). The ALI group consistently scored lower than the ASD group on both sentence production and repetition tasks. Strategic scoring appeared feasible for identifying language impairment without being confounded by language variation.

Group differences were specifically observed in grammatical utterance production and overt structure production during repetition tasks, supporting the clinical utility of these assessment approaches.

Strategic scoring of sentence production and repetition tasks may be useful for identifying language impairment in autistic adolescents and adults across diverse linguistic backgrounds. These findings support clinical use of structured language assessment, though larger validation studies are needed before widespread implementation.

Small sample size (n=31) limits generalizability. Authors acknowledge need for replication with larger, age-diverse samples and comparison with dialect-sensitive measures. Study design and methodology details are not fully described in the abstract.

Despite the clinical utility of sentence production and sentence repetition to identify language impairment in autism, little is known about the extent to which these tasks are sensitive to potential language variation. One promising method is strategic scoring, which has good clinical utility for identifying language impairment in nonautistic school-age children across variants of English. This report applies strategic scoring to analyze sentence repetition and sentence production in autistic adolescents and adults. Thirty-one diverse autistic adolescents and adults with language impairment (ALI;= 15) and without language impairment (ASD;= 16) completed the Formulated Sentences and Recalling Sentences subtests of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-Fifth Edition.

Descriptive analyses and regression evaluated effects of scoring condition, group, and scoring condition by group on outcomes, as well as group differences in finiteness marking across utterances and morphosyntactic structures. Strategic and unmodified item-level scores were essentially constant on both subtests and significantly lower in the ALI than the ASD group. Only group predicted item-level scores. Group differences were limited to: percent grammatical utterances on Formulated Sentences and percent production of overt structures combined on Sentence Repetition (ALI < ASD).

Findings support the feasibility of strategic scoring for sentence production and sentence repetition to identify language impairment and indicate that potential language variation in finiteness marking did not confound outcomes in this sample. To better understand the clinical utility of strategic scoring, replication with a larger sample varying in age and comparisons with dialect-sensitive measures are needed. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.25822336.