Poster #69 - Children With ASD Improve Categorical Induction Performance Over Time

• In Event: Poster Session 14

Abstract

Categorical induction (CI) involves transferring information about a familiar category (e.g., dogs) onto a new category member (e.g., an unknown novel dog). Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) perform less consistently on CI tasks compared to typically developing (TD) children of the same chronological and mental age (Naigles et al., 2013). Tecoulesco et al. (2021) reported that TD children made more correct extensions to true category members than did children with ASD. Here, based on longitudinal data, we re-examine a subset of Tecoulesco et al.’s participants and compare within-group performance at Time 1 (T1; Tecoulesco et al., 2021) to within-group performance on a different, age-appropriate CI task at Time 2 (T2; approx. 10 years later). We also perform a cross-sectional analysis on a larger sample at T2 to investigate whether between-group differences in CI performance might be diminished when controlling for language ability.

Participants in the longitudinal analysis included eight children with ASD (T1 mean age=6.24 years, T2 mean age=14.63) and 11 TD children (T1 mean age=5.60 years, T2 mean age=14.27). At T1, participants were shown the pictures and question in Figure 1a. Percent CI at T1 was calculated as the proportion of target items to which the participant extended the category’s property. Participants in the cross-sectional analysis at T2 included the longitudinal participants and an additional seven autistic (N=15; mean age=16.86 years) and six TD (N=17; mean age=15.47 years) participants. The TD group’s combined Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-Fifth Edition (CELF-5; Wiig et al., 2013) raw scores (semantic and syntactic subscales) exceeded the ASD group’s (ts>2.89, ps=.003). At T2, a more complex CI task was used (Figure 1b). Percent CI at T2 was calculated as the proportion of times the participant assigned the third animal to the more inclusive category (group over single, diverse over homogeneous).

As predicted, the longitudinal analysis showed that the ASD group’s percent CI at T2 (M=63.89%, SD=7.86%) was significantly higher than at T1 (M=42.19%, SD=24.94%), t(7)=2.15, p=.034 (Figure 2a). Individually, six of the eight ASD participants improved from T1 to T2. By contrast, the TD group’s percent CI did not change from T1 to T2 (p=.258). Also as predicted, the cross-sectional analysis at T2 found that the ASD group scored significantly lower than the TD group, t(30)=2.42, p=.011 (Figure 2b), but this difference was no longer significant when controlling for CELF-5 scores.

The longitudinal ASD group’s improvement from T1 to T2 suggests that CI may be a later-developing skill in ASD. Rather than occurring as a uniform impairment, CI may simply be delayed in autistic individuals. Furthermore, the difference in cross-sectional ASD and TD performance at T2 was accounted for by differences in language ability, bolstering the possibility that the difficulties with categorization associated with ASD may be linguistic in origin.

Authors

• Grace Audrey Corrigan, University of Connecticut
  Presenting Author

• Lee Tecoulesco, Boys Town National Research Hospital

• Juandiego Carmona, University of Connecticut

• Letitia R Naigles, University of Connecticut