BERNABE, Annika Mariel L.

2017-03472

Language, Communication, and Autism Spectrum Disorder

Synthesis Paper

Language and communication are the common struggles found among people diagnosed with
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by persistent
impairments in social communication and interaction, restricted and repetitive behavior, and an onset of the
disorder in early childhood (APA, 2013).

In Kanner’s (1943) original description of autism as cited by Lartseva, A., Dijkstra, T., & Buitelaar,
J. K. (2015), emphasized are the presence of emotional impairments which characterized the patients
indifferent to other people, self-absorbed, emotionally cold, distanced, and retracted. Further, clinically
important diagnostic characteristics of ASD include – lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment,
emotions, affect, interests, or achievements with other people, and a lack of emotional reciprocity.

With Autism Spectrum Disorder as a lifetime impediment among diagnosed individuals, many
development areas will surely be affected; upbringing from childhood to adulthood will definitely be a
struggle as language (verbal or non-verbal) serves as a channel towards expression. In discussing language
in ASD, specifically on the emotional aspect, it is important to keep in mind that many people with ASD
have problems in language development and impairment in verbal and nonverbal communication. And as
cited by Hahn, L. J., Brady, N. C., & Versaci, T. (2019), early development, children communicate with
pre-linguistic behaviors like eye gaze, gestures, and nonspeech vocalizations (Bates & Dick, 2002).

These can be characterized by difficulties in communication and social interaction, and by

restricted and repetitive behaviors and interests. Formal language impairment does not constitute a core
symptom for diagnosis, but a broad set of linguistic difficulties may be manifested in individuals with ASD,
ranging from the complete absence of language to difficulties with the lexical-semantic, grammatical, and
pragmatic components thereof (Ramírez-Santana, G. M., Acosta-Rodríguez, V. M., & Hernández-Expósito,
S., 2019).

Many studies on the processing of emotion language have focused on discourse, such as talking
about emotional topics and making inferences about emotional states (Adams et al., 2002; Losh and Capps,
2006; Barnes et al., 2009; Lartseva, A., Dijkstra, T., & Buitelaar, J. K., 2015). Individuals with autism have
difficulties expressing complex thoughts in general and that problems in reasoning on emotional topics are
not very emotion specific, which can also be an alternative explanation.

Collating the different articles relative to language and Autism Spectrum Disorder, many
similarities and contrasting insights were found leading to a relative conclusion.

To connect apparent insights, critiqued articles utilized similar data gathering methods through
selecting all original studies that compared the performance of a group of people diagnosed with ASD with
controls on an emotion-related measure, as well as using tests to qualitatively assess their language
processing, whether emotional, facial, etc.

Studies also commonly stated that individuals with ASD have problems with processing faces in
general, not restricted to only emotional faces (Jemel et al., 2006; Harms et al., 2010; Lartseva, A., Dijkstra,
T., & Buitelaar, J. K., 2015). Emotional language has been investigated in a variety of tasks including
recognition and recall, stimulus detection, and discourse and reasoning and it was found that subjects with
ASD also display abnormalities in their automatic attentional reaction to emotionally salient stimuli.

Moreover, understanding single words for people with ASD is less problematic than understanding
complete sentences and natural speech (Tager-Flusberg et al., 2005; Williams et al., 2008). It was also
found that understanding single words for people with ASD is less problematic than understanding
complete sentences and natural speech (Tager-Flusberg et al., 2005; Williams et al., 2008).

In contrast to common studies, it was found among the articles that compared to typical individuals,
individuals with ASD do not spontaneously pay attention to faces, ignore the eye region and focus on less
significant parts of the face (Jemel et al., 2006; Wolf et al., 2008; Senju and Johnson, 2009); even in studies
that do report main group effects in facial emotion recognition, there is lack of clarity on whether the
differences should be explained by a more specific emotional impairment, or by more general problems in
face processing.

Conclusively, articles gathered suggest that emotion language impairments are present in both
production and comprehension modes and that there is no evidence for an imbalance between production
and comprehension emotion language skills in ASD.

Generally, there is an interplay in the language profiles of people with ASD that seems unlikely to
have occurred by chance and suggests some degree of overlap in the genetic factors that contribute to each
condition (Bishop, 2014; Tager-Flusberg, 2016). Studies also demonstrate that subjects with ASD have
widespread impairments in processing emotional language, and these impairments are present in tasks
tapping into different cognitive domains, in comprehension as well as production tasks, and tasks of varying
levels of complexity. Individuals with ASD are able to correctly identify words, sentences or stories as
emotionally positive or negative (Volden and Sorenson, 2009; Grossman et al., 2010; Brown et al., 2012),
but have difficulty with providing an in-depth explanation (Bauminger, 2004; Rieffe et al., 2007).

Little attention has also been paid in research in ASD to processing of other types of emotional
stimuli, such as emotional language (understanding of emotion-laden words, sentences and text; talking
about emotions; perception and production of emotional intonation in speech). There is even a lack of
research on emotion processing in non-social tasks (Gaigg, 2012; Nuske et al., 2013). On a broader level,
it can be indicated that emotional impairments in ASD should receive more attention from both researchers
and clinicians – whether through different methods of data gathering and data analysis to provide a more
qualitative insight, away from the traditional ones.
JOURNAL ARTICLES:

Lartseva, A., Dijkstra, T., & Buitelaar, J. K. (2015). Emotional language processing in autism spectrum
disorders: a systematic review. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 8, 991.

Ramírez-Santana, G. M., Acosta-Rodríguez, V. M., & Hernández-Expósito, S. (2019). A comparative study

of language phenotypes in Autism Spectrum Disorder and Specific Language Impairment.
Psicothema, 31(4).

Hahn, L. J., Brady, N. C., & Versaci, T. (2019). Communicative Use of Triadic Eye Gaze in Children With
Down Syndrome, Autism Spectrum Disorder, and Other Intellectual and Developmental
Disabilities. American journal of speech-language pathology, 1-14.