Social communication impairments in children and adolescents with Asperger syndrome: Slow response time and the impact of prompting

In the present study children and adolescents with Asperger syndrome (N = 13) and a matched control group of typically developing children and adolescents were presented with 26 vignettes of daily life situations, including irony, metaphors, contrary emotions, jealousy, social blunders, and understanding intentions. The participants in the AS group showed significant impairments in social communication. They needed significantly longer response times to solve the tasks and required significantly more prompt questions than the control persons. When analyzing the AS participants’ performances before any prompt questions had been given, their task performances were significantly poorer than after the prompts had been given indicating that without any prompt questions their task performance would have fallen markedly.

Research highlights▶ Children with AS have substantial problems inferring mental-states in a story context. ▶ They use significantly longer time than normal, matched controls answering the test questions. ▶ They need significantly more prompts than the controls to be able to answer the test questions. ▶ They have substantially more problems inferring mental-states as compared to physical-states.