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Author(s): Eleni Peristeri [sup.1] , Ianthi Maria Tsimpli [sup.2] Author Affiliations: (1) https://ror.org/02j61yw88, grid.4793.9, 0000 0001 0945 7005, School of English, Faculty of Philosophy, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, , 541 [...], Twenty-eight Albanian-Greek bilingual children with Developmental Language Disorder and 28 children with Autism Spectrum Disorder but no language impairment, along with 28 typically-developing, age-, Performance IQ- and socioeconomic status-matched bilingual children were asked to produce two expository texts which were coded for spelling (phonological, grammatical, orthographic) errors, stress and punctuation use. The children's expressive vocabulary, current language use and home language history were also measured. The results show that the bilingual children with Developmental Language Disorder were particularly vulnerable to spelling errors, while their bilingual peers with Autism Spectrum Disorder were rather challenged by stress and punctuation. The evidence speaks in favor of distinct patterns of writing impairment across the bilingual children with Developmental Language Disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Children with autism often display discrepancies in their intellectual functioning, with nonverbal skills frequently being more developed than verbal. Compared to monolingual autistic children, however, much less is known about how bilingualism affects intelligence in autism. The current study examined the intelligence profiles of 146 bilingual and 170 age- and gender-matched monolingual children with autism (6-17 years) using the Wechsler Intelligence Scales for Children-Third Edition, by tracking cluster profiles across children and by modeling verbal and nonverbal IQ performance in each cluster as a function of language experience (monolinguals vs bilinguals), socioeconomic status, and age. The results reveal that socioeconomic status, operationalized as mother's years of education, mediated by bilingualism was strongly related to autistic children's intelligence. Low-socioeconomic status bilingual autistic children exhibited better performance than their monolingual peers across both the verbal and nonverbal intelligence subtests. However, the difference found in the intelligence profiles between monolinguals and bilinguals belonging to high-socioeconomic status was limited to the Comprehension Wechsler Intelligence Scales for Children test, with high-socioeconomic status monolingual autistic children outperforming their bilingual peers. The findings highlight the importance of investigating bilingualism effects in relation to socioeconomic status in autism.

Although a considerable number of studies have shown D(eterminer) elements, i.e. determiners and pronominal clitics, to be particularly vulnerable to impairment in monolingual children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), little is known about the use of appropriate or/and grammatically correct referring expressions in the children's narrative production. Grammars of languages that differ in the way they encode and realize their D system may be viewed as the ideal context to disentangle the contribution of language (L1) transfer and morpho-syntactic impairment to reference use in the L2. The aim of the current study is to examine L1 effects in the use of referring expressions of 5- to 11-year-old Albanian-Greek and Russian-Greek children with DLD, along with typically developing (TD) bilingual groups speaking the same language pairs when maintaining reference to characters in their narratives. The three languages differ in their D elements, since Albanian and Greek have morphologically rich D systems in contrast to Russian, which lacks a definiteness distinction. Children produced oral narratives in Greek by using the Greek versions of two stories (Cat and Dog) which have been designed within the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) tool of the COST Action IS0804. Results show that the groups did not differ in referential appropriateness. Regarding grammatical correctness, both groups with DLD produced more ungrammatical forms than TD children, while Russian-Greek children with DLD produced more ungrammatical article-less NPs than the other groups. The overall results reflect the joint contribution of language impairment and L1-specific typological properties in the definite forms used for character maintenance by bilingual children with DLD.

The present study compared two sentence–picture-matching tests in Greek, namely the Syntactic Proficiency Test and the sentence comprehension subtest of the Diagnostic Verbal Intelligence Quotient (DVIQ) battery, to assess complex sentence comprehension in 29 Greek-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Crucially, the DVIQ test included more foils and visual details than the Syntactic Proficiency Test. The study had three aims: (1) to examine sentence comprehension performance across various syntactically complex structures (passives, clitic pronouns, subject, and object relative clauses) and identify comprehension asymmetries among these types; (2) to investigate task effects on syntactic comprehension accuracy by comparing performance across the two tests; and (3) to examine differences in error types across tasks. Results showed that autistic children were significantly less accurate in their comprehension performance of passives and clitics in the DVIQ compared to the Syntactic Proficiency Test, with no difference in accuracy observed for subject or object relative clauses, which were consistently high and low, respectively, across both tests. Error patterns also differed across the two tests. More specifically, thematic role reversals in passives were more frequent in the DVIQ than the Syntactic Proficiency Test. The overall findings suggest that the DVIQ's enhanced perceptual complexity may have affected children's accuracy in their comprehension of passives and clitics, while object relatives were less affected by task effects because of their high structural complexity. The study highlights how visual complexity and foil count can impact syntactic comprehension in autistic children and underscores the importance of task design in assessing syntactic skills in ASD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the resolution of ambiguous null and overt subject pronouns in child speakers of null subject languages has found that school-aged children do not exhibit robust preference for either subject or object referents, further suggesting that the operations underlying anaphora processing are still in development and have not yet attained adult-like status even at age 11. In addition to school-aged children, sensitivity to the properties of null and overt subject pronouns in early childhood remains to a large extent underexplored. The current study has investigated ambiguous null and overt pronoun resolution preferences in a group of 38 Greek-speaking children aged 4;0 to 5;9 and a group of monolingual adults. The study used a picture verification task that examined participants’ preferences for subject, object, and extra-sentential referents of null and overt pronouns. The children’s lexical abilities were also assessed through an expressive vocabulary task. According to the results, children did not show a strong preference for either subject or object referents, which were preferred at equally low rates across both null and overt pronoun trials. However, there was strong preference for the extra-sentential referent that seemed to be attenuated with increase in the children’s chronological age and vocabulary skills. The current study contributes to the discussion regarding the instability in children’s pronoun processing system and the way it is affected by maturation and language ability. Our findings show that sensitivity to the discourse constraints regulating the comprehension of null and overt subject pronouns has not yet been attained in preschool-aged children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research in the field of figurative language processing in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) has demonstrated that autistic individuals experience systematic difficulties in the comprehension of different types of metaphors. However, there is scarce evidence regarding metaphor production skills in ASD. Importantly, the exact source of metaphor processing difficulties in ASD remains largely controversial. The debate has mainly focused on the mediating role of structural language skills (i.e., lexical knowledge) and cognitive abilities (i.e., Theory of Mind and executive functions) in ASD individuals' ability to comprehend and generate metaphors. The present study examines metaphor comprehension and production in 18 Greek‐speaking verbally able children with ASD and 31 typically‐developing (TD) controls. Participants completed two tasks, namely, a low‐verbal multiple‐choice sentence‐picture matching task that tested their ability to comprehend conventional predicate metaphors, and a sentence continuation task that assessed their ability to generate metaphors. The study also included measures of fluid intelligence, expressive vocabulary, and working memory within the sample. The results show that the ASD group had significantly lower performance than the TD group in both metaphor comprehension and production. The findings also reveal that expressive vocabulary skills were a key factor in the metaphor comprehension and production performance of the children with ASD. Working memory capacity was also found to correlate significantly with metaphor comprehension performance in the ASD group. Conversely, no correlations were found in the TD group with neither of the above factors. Of note, children with ASD generated significantly more inappropriate responses and no‐responses to the metaphor production task compared with the control group. The overall results reveal that children with ASD had difficulty with both comprehending and using metaphorical language. The findings also indicate that TD children may employ diverse cognitive strategies or rely on different underlying skills when processing metaphors compared with children with ASD. Lay Summary: Difficulties related to metaphor comprehension are commonly observed in ASD individuals. However, less is known about metaphor production abilities in ASD. In this study, we compared metaphor comprehension and production skills in 18 verbally able Greek‐speaking children with ASD and 31 TD children, and also examined the role of vocabulary knowledge and working memory in metaphor processing. The overall results show that both metaphor comprehension and production were more challenging for the children with ASD as compared with their TD peers. Furthermore, we found that vocabulary knowledge is a factor that significantly influences both metaphor comprehension and production performance of ASD participants. The study also reveals that metaphor comprehension abilities in children with ASD are based on working memory skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theory of Mind has long been studied as a core weakness in autism spectrum disorder due to its relationship with social reciprocity, while bilingualism has been shown to compensate for autistic individuals' mentalizing weaknesses. However, our knowledge of the Theory of Mind developmental trajectories of bilingual and monolingual autistic children, as well as of the factors related to Theory of Mind development in autism spectrum disorder is still limited. The current study has examined first‐ and second‐order Theory of Mind skills in 21 monolingual and 21 bilingual autistic children longitudinally across three time points, specifically at ages 6, 9, and 12, and also investigated associations between Theory of Mind trajectories and trajectories of the children's language, intelligence and executive function skills. The results reveal that bilingual autistic children outperformed their monolingual peers in second‐order Theory of Mind at ages 9 and 12, and that intelligence and, especially, expressive vocabulary skills played a pivotal role in advancing bilingual autistic children's second‐order Theory of Mind development. On the other hand, monolingual autistic children only managed to capitalize on their language and intelligence resources at age 12. The findings highlight the importance of investigating bilingualism effects on autistic children's advanced cognitive abilities longitudinally. Lay Summary: The current study offers evidence on the developmental trajectories of both first‐ and second‐order Theory of Mind skills in 21 bilingual and 21 monolingual autistic children that were initially tested at age 6, and were then followed up at ages 9 and 12. The same children were also administered language, intelligence, and executive function tests across the three time points. The results show that bilingualism improved autistic children's second‐order Theory of Mind skills after age 9, while this boosting effect was driven by the children's expressive vocabulary and intelligence skills. The findings emphasize the beneficial effects of bilingualism on autistic children's advanced Theory of Mind, and also highlight the importance of language and intelligence underlying this effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BackgroundAimsMethods & ProceduresOutcomes & ResultsConclusionsNarrative production has been widely characterized as providing an ecologically valid way to assess language skills in post-stroke aphasia. Although narrative tasks have been instrumental in delineating patterns of lexical and syntactic production in individuals with agrammatic aphasia, our knowledge of how narrative skills are affected in agrammatic aphasia is still limited.The study’s aims were to (a) compare narrative performance between individuals with agrammatic aphasia and a language-unimpaired group, (b) investigate the contribution of lexical and syntactic skills in each group’s narrative organizational skills, and (c) explore the effects of executive functions on each group’s narrative performance.The study included 14 individuals with agrammatic aphasia and 14 age- and education-matched language unimpaired individuals as the control group. Both groups told the Cinderella story, and their narrative production was analyzed in terms of microstructure (lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, clause length) and macrostructure (story grammar, story structure complexity). Each group’s executive functions were evaluated through the One-Touch Stockings of Cambridge test that assesses working memory, and the Intra-Extra Dimensional Set Shift test that assesses cognitive flexibility.Regarding narrative microstructure, the individuals with agrammatism scored significantly lower than controls in syntactic complexity and clause length, but not in lexical diversity, but they performed lower than controls in both narrative macrostructural measurements. Also, the agrammatic group scored lower than controls in both executive function tasks. A series of linear regression models showed that microstructural skills significantly affected narrative macrostructural abilities in the cohort with agrammatic aphasia, while controls’ macrostructure was affected by both narrative microstructure and executive function skills.The individuals with agrammatic aphasia exhibited impairment in both low-level language features of narrative production, such as syntactic complexity and narrative length, and global measures of narrative organization. Their macrostructural performance critically relied on their language resources, while controls’ narrative macrostructure seemed to also draw on domain-general cognitive skills. These findings suggest that both low-level language and high-level discourse organizational skills are vulnerable in narrative production in agrammatic aphasia, and that macrostructural skills are mainly related to the individuals’ microstructural skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rare coding variants in TREM2 and their association with the susceptibility towards Alzheimer's disease (AD) were recently studied in various ethnic groups with contradictory results. The T allele of the rs75932628 (p.R47H variant) has shown a positive risk association with AD in several studies; however, neither a study in Greece nor an updated meta-analysis have been conducted. To assess the association between TREM2 rs75932628 and late-onset (sporadic) AD in a Greek population, and perform a meta-analysis of current data. The rs75932628 was genotyped in a total of 327 patients with AD and 700 cognitively healthy controls. A systematic search and meta-analyses of studies presenting data regarding rs75932628 in AD cases and controls were also performed. Three patients vs. none of the controls were found to carry the heterozygous risk allele of the rs75932628, yielding a significant association (p = 0.032), in the Greek sample. In the meta-analysis, the overall odds ratio (OR) under a fixed-effects model was 2.98 (Confidence Interval (CI):2.52–3.53) showing a significant association of the rs75932628-T allele with AD in the overall dataset, based on data from 27 studies (26200 AD cases and 142084controls). Caucasian population-only studies (n = 16) revealed a similar OR of 2.93 (CI:2.45–3.51), whereas Asian population-only studies (n = 5) had a non-significant OR of 0.84 (CI:0.19–3.74). The rs75932628 was associated with AD in the Greek sample. Our meta-analysis, covering a total population of over 168,000 people, also showed a significant association of the allele with AD in Caucasian populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the consensus that early identification leads to better outcomes for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), recent research reveals that the average age of diagnosis in the Greek population is approximately six years. However, this age of diagnosis is delayed by an additional two years for families from lower-income or minority backgrounds. These disparities result in adverse impacts on intervention outcomes, which are further burdened by the often time-consuming and labor-intensive language assessments for children with ASD. There is a crucial need for tools that increase access to early assessment and diagnosis that will be rigorous and objective. The current study leverages the capabilities of artificial intelligence to develop a reliable and practical model for distinguishing children with ASD from typically-developing peers based on their narrative and vocabulary skills. We applied natural language processing-based extraction techniques to automatically acquire language features (narrative and vocabulary skills) from storytelling in 68 children with ASD and 52 typically-developing children, and then trained machine learning models on the children's combined narrative and expressive vocabulary data to generate behavioral targets that effectively differentiate ASD from typically-developing children. According to the findings, the model could distinguish ASD from typically-developing children, achieving an accuracy of 96%. Specifically, out of the models used, hist gradient boosting and XGBoost showed slightly superior performance compared to the decision trees and gradient boosting models, particularly regarding accuracy and F1 score. These results bode well for the deployment of machine learning technology for children with ASD, especially those with limited access to early identification services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Impairments in the broader domain of pragmatics are considered to be a defining feature of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). A challenging aspect of pragmatic competence is the ability to process nonliteral language. Interestingly, previous studies in figurative language comprehension in ASD have demonstrated conflicting results regarding participants' performance. The main scientific debate focuses on the underlying skills which facilitate processing of nonliteral speech in ASD. Namely, Theory of Mind (ToM), language abilities and Executive functions (EFs) are regarded as factors affecting autistic individuals' performance. This review addresses figurative language comprehension in ASD in light of the above three interpretive accounts. We reviewed data from recent studies in this field concluding that autistic children indeed encounter systematic difficulties in the processing of non‐literal language. Moreover, only ToM and verbal skills were found to correlate the most with figurative language comprehension in ASD. Notably, we found that differences related to research methodology and tasks' properties may have led to discrepancies between studies' results. Finally, we argue that future studies should encompass in their experimental design figurative comprehension tasks with minimal linguistic demands and also measures of ToM, verbal ability and EFs in order to shed more light in the independent contribution of those skills to the processing of nonliteral language in ASD. Lay Summary: Difficulties related to figurative language processing are commonly observed among autistic individuals. However both the extent and the exact source of these difficulties remain controversial. We reviewed studies from the last decade examining the processing of different subtypes of nonliteral language in ASD, including metaphors, idioms and verbal irony with a focus on the role of ToM, language abilities, and EFs in figurative language comprehension. This review highlights the importance of using low‐verbal nonliteral language tasks and argues that ToM, language skills, and EFs may have independent contributions to autistic individuals' ability to process nonliteral forms of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an editorial that discusses the neural mechanisms of language and cognitive performance in individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders, specifically autism. The editorial highlights the challenges that individuals with autism face in language comprehension, auditory processing, expressive language, executive functions, intellectual functioning, and social cognition. The research topic aims to expand the understanding of language and cognitive skills in individuals with autism through various methodological approaches. The article also presents several studies that investigate the relationship between executive functioning and autism symptomatology, cortical auditory processing and verbal communication abilities, embodied language comprehension skills, and language, cognitive, and sensory profiles in individuals with autism and epilepsy. Additionally, the article explores the reading comprehension skills of children with autism and the impact of decoding, fluency, morphological and syntactic, and metalinguistic skills on reading comprehension. The overall findings highlight the neurodevelopmental differences in individuals with autism and emphasize the importance of targeting domain-specific cognitive, sensory, and linguistic disruptions to improve their everyday functioning. [Extracted from the article]

We investigated the on-line processing of unaccusative and unergative sentences in a group of eight Greek-speaking individuals diagnosed with Broca aphasia and a group of language-unimpaired subjects used as the baseline. The processing of unaccusativity refers to the reactivation of the postverbal trace by retrieving the mnemonic representation of the verb's syntactically defined antecedent provided in the early part of the sentence. Our results demonstrate that the Broca group showed selective reactivation of the antecedent for the unaccusatives. We consider several interpretations for our data, including explanations focusing on the transitivization properties of nonactive and active voice-alternating unaccusatives, the costly procedure claimed to underlie the parsing of active nonvoice-alternating unaccusatives, and the animacy of the antecedent modulating the syntactic choices of the patients.

The aim of this study is to test the validity and reliability of the Bilingual Aphasia Test as a measure of language impairment in a Greek-speaking Broca's aphasic population and to investigate relationships with the same aphasic group's performance on the Greek version of the short form of the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination battery, mainly focusing on a series of subtests which are shared by the two batteries, yet occasionally differ in content. Correlation analyses showed that the two instruments yielded highly comparable results with respect to the measurement of reading and listening comprehension, as well as in the performance-based measurement of the automated sequence capacity of the patients. Nevertheless, the Bilingual Aphasia Test, as a more extensive battery, proved to be more sensitive and objective in characterizing the patients' language abilities in a number of individual language functions, including commands, sentence repetition, naming, verbal fluency and syntactic comprehension. (Contains 5 tables and 4 notes.)