This case study investigates the effects of Robot Assisted Language Learning (RALL) on English vocabulary learning and retention of Iranian children with high-functioning autism. Two groups of three male students (6-10 years old) with high-functioning autism participated in the current study. The humanoid robot NAO was used as a teacher assistant to teach English to the RALL group. Both RALL an...

Past research has shown a superiority of participants with high-functioning autism over comparison groups in memorizing picture-pitch associations and in detecting pitch changes in melodies. A subset of individuals with autism, known as "musical savants," is also known to possess absolute pitch. This superiority might be due to an abnormally high sensitivity to fine-grained pitch differences in...

This study examines the academic abilities of children and adolescents who were once diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder, but who no longer meet diagnostic criteria for this disorder. These individuals have achieved social and language skills within the average range for their ages, receive little or no school support, and are referred to as having achieved "optimal outcomes." Performanc...

BACKGROUND Disordered expressive prosody is a widely reported characteristic of individuals with autism. Despite this, it has received little attention in the literature and the few studies that have addressed it have not described its relationship to other aspects of communication. AIMS To determine the nature and relationship of expressive and receptive language, phonology, pragmatics, and ...

This study tested the efficacy of a new social skills intervention, S ocial S kills GR oup IN tervention-High Functioning Autism (S.S.GRIN-HFA), designed to improve social behaviors in children with high functioning autism spectrum disorders. Fifty-five children were randomly assigned to S.S.GRIN-HFA treatment (n = 27) or control (i.e., traditional S.S.GRIN intervention; n = 28). Examination of...

This case-comparison study explores the underlying mechanisms of imitation problems in school-aged males with autism. Analysis of congruent error types in their imitation performance was made and compared with appropriate comparisons. Fifty-five males (eight low-functioning with autism: mean age 6y 2mo [SD 7.6mo]; 13 low-functioning with learning disabilities: mean age 6y 3mo [SD 2.8mo]; 17 hig...

While autism is one of the most intensively researched psychiatric disorders, little is known about reasoning skills of people with autism. The focus of this study was on defeasible inferences, that is inferences that can be revised in the light of new information. We used a behavioral task to investigate (a) conditional reasoning and (b) the suppression of conditional inferences in high-functi...

This study examined the roles of verbal and nonverbal sources of information in the ability of persons with and without autism to recognize emotion. Child, adolescent, and young adult participants in four groups [Lower Functioning Autism (LFA) (n = 17), High Functioning Autism (HFA) (n = 18), Lower Functioning Comparison (LFC) (n = 18), and High Functioning Comparison (HFC) (n = 23)] identified...

The project aims at comparing typical and autistic participants with respect to their processing of the scalar implicature not all associated with the weak quantifier some. Highfunctioning autists often show atypical performance with respect to pragmatic aspects of language processing, including difficulties with the processing of defeasible reasoning, pragmatic inferences and linguistic inform...

High-functioning children with autism were compared with two control groups on measures of anxiety and social worries. Comparison control groups consisted of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and normally developing children. Each group consisted of 15 children between the ages of 8 and 12 years and were matched for age and gender. Children with autism were found to be most anxio...