This study investigated the morphosyntactic
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Disorder (ASD) using a Saudi Arabic Sentence Repetition Task
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study was to determine whether Saudi Arabic-speaking children with
autism living in Saudi have difficulties in morphosyntax as a
function of their verbal abilities. For this reason, the
participating children with autism were divided into subgroups of
children with autism with normal language (ALN) and children with
autism with language impairment (ALI) based on their verbal
abilities. The second objective of this study was to identify
whether the children’s performance differs as a function of the
scoring scheme used. Towards that aim, two scoring schemes were used
based on whether children repeated sentences verbatim versus whether
they used the targeted structure accurately. The third objective was
to address differences between the structures used in the Saudi-SRT.
The study involved 62 five- to seven-year-old children who speak
Saudi Arabic as their first language: 20 children with autism
(n = 10 ALN and n = 10 ALI)
and 42 typically developing (TD) control children. The children with
autism showed difficulties in morphosyntax as a function of their
verbal abilities, but the scoring scheme modulated this. In
nonverbal abilities and receptive vocabulary, ALI scored lower than
TD and ALN, and there was no difference between TD and ALN. As for
the grammatical abilities, the less sensitive verbatim scheme showed
a similar pattern in the ALN and ALI children who performed less
well than the TD children; in contrast, the more sensitive
structural scheme showed that in the most syntactically complex
structures, the ALN children performed similarly to the TD children
and better than the ALI children.
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