Sound before meaning: Word learning in autistic disorders

▶ Word learning requires integration of social, semantic and phonological information. ▶ Children with ASD and age appropriate vocabularies use gaze cues to learn words. ▶ These children also excel at learning the sound structure of new words. ▶ Differences in distribution of fixations suggests poorer understanding of gaze cues. ▶ Children with ASD show minimal improvement in learning over time relative to peers. ▶ Focus on sound over meaning may explain qualitative differences in ASD language.