Morpho-Syntactic Characteristics of Hebrew- Speaking Pre-School Children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder

Difficulties in pragmatics are attributed to all children with ASD (autism spectrum disorder), but there is variation in difficulties in the areas of lexicon and morpho-syntax. There is evidence that in this population there are children who show normal language abilities and there are children who show difficulties in these areas. Studies carried out so far in the field of morpho-syntax were mostly conducted in English, a language whose morpho-syntax structure is different from the Hebrew language. The Hebrew language is a morphologically rich language both in the field of derivation and in the field of derivation. On the one hand, a morphologically rich language exposes the listener to many examples and requires him to use complex morphological structures. On the other hand, it is a challenge for children with language difficulties who have to deal with various morpho-syntactic complexities. The morpho-syntax domain is considered a particularly difficult domain to acquire in children with language impairment, so it was interesting to investigate whether Hebrew-speaking children with ALI present a linguistic profile similar to that of children with DLD in the morpho-syntax. domain.

The purpose of the present study is to compare the morphosyntactic characteristics of children with ASD and language impairment, against control groups: children with DLD, children with typical development and children with ASD without language impairment and to check if the verbal profile is similar or different.

80 children aged 3:5 to 6 years participated in this study, 20 children with ASD and language impairment, 20 children with ASD without language impairment, 20 children with DLD, 20 children with typical development. The research tools that were used included: a) background tests: the Raven test for assessing non-verbal intelligence, and the "Gurlnik" diagnosis for language screening, and b) a morpho-syntactic assessment: a grammar subtest from the "Katzenberger" diagnosis for kindergarten children, and a past tense test.

The results of the work expanded our understanding of morphosyntactic abilities in children with ASD and showed that their abilities are similar to children with DLD. It was also found that children with ALN showed similar abilities to children with typical development except for one subtest of the "Katzenberger" test.