Hopkins Z, et al. – The focus of the presented study was to investigate whether children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) spontaneously lexically aligned and whether conflict inhibition mediated alignment. The analysis in this study showed that children with ASD's referential communication were robust to impairments in conflict inhibition under some circumstances. Their pragmatic deficits could be mitigated in a highly structured interaction.

Methods

• In the study presented here, children with ASD and chronological- and verbal-age-matched typically developing controls played a picture-naming game.
• The authors in this study manipulated whether the experimenter used a preferred or dispreferred name for each picture, and inspected whether children subsequently used the same name.

Results

• The results of this study revealed that children with ASD spontaneously lexically aligned, to the same extent as typically developing controls.
• It was noted that alignment was unrelated to conflict inhibition in both groups.