Sentence repetition and language impairment in French-speaking children with ASD

This study investigates formal language abilities in French-speaking children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). We report on the usefulness of the LITMUS-Sentence-Repetition-French task in distinguishing children with impaired language (ASD-LI) from children with normal language (ASD-LN). We examined complexity of syntactic computation, to determine whether children with ASD-LI behave analogously to children with SLI. Results showed that the ASD-LI group performed like the SLI group, while the ASD-LN group performed like the TD group. Despite the existence of a link between nonverbal IQ (NVIQ) and performance on SR, this correlation was not linear, due to the presence of children with each of the four formal language ability/NVIQ profiles, indicating the possible independence of formal language from nonverbal intelligence.