Do autistic children differ in language-mediated prediction?

Prediction appears to be an important characteristic of the human mind. It has also been suggested that pre-diction is a core difference of autistic1 children. Past research exploring language-mediated anticipatory eye movements in autistic children, however, has been somewhat contradictory, with some studies finding normal anticipatory processing in autistic children with low levels of autistic traits but others observing weaker pre-diction effects in autistic children with less receptive language skills. Here we investigated language-mediated anticipatory eye movements in young children who differed in the severity of their level of autistic traits and were in professional institutional care in Hangzhou, China. We chose the same spoken sentences (translated into Mandarin Chinese) and visual stimuli as a previous study which observed robust prediction effects in young children (Mani & Huettig, 2012) and included a control group of typically-developing children. Typically developing but not autistic children showed robust prediction effects. Most interestingly, autistic children with lower communication, motor, and (adaptive) behavior scores exhibited both less predictive and non-predictive visual attention behavior. Our results raise the possibility that differences in language-mediated anticipatory eye movements in autistic children with higher levels of autistic traits may be differences in visual attention in disguise, a hypothesis that needs further investigation.

Automated summary

Prediction is an important characteristic of human cognition, and it is found to be a core difference in autistic children. Previous studies on language-mediated anticipatory eye movements in autistic children have shown contradictory results. In this study, we investigated these eye movements in young children with varying levels of autistic traits. Results suggest that typically developing children showed robust prediction effects, while autistic children with lower communication, motor, and behavior scores exhibited weaker prediction effects and non-predictive visual attention behavior. These findings raise the possibility that differences in language-mediated anticipatory eye movements in autistic children may actually manifest as differences in visual attention.