This study investigates syntax in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), its parallelism with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and its relation to other aspects of cognition. We focus on (1) 3^rd person accusative clitic (ACC3) production, a clinical marker of SLI hypothesized to relate to WM, and (2) 1^st person accusative clitic (ACC1) production, preserved in SLI but hypothesized to be affected in ASD due to Theory-of-Mind (ToM) difficulties. Participants included 21 individuals with ASD (aged 5-16), 22 individuals with SLI (aged 5-16), age-matched and younger TD controls (N = 44). Clinical groups showed similar deficits for ACC3 and general morphosyntax. Closer analysis revealed that a subgroup of children with ASD displayed intact grammar except for ACC1, where children with SLI performed well. Better ToM scores implied better ACC1 scores in ASD. Difficulties with WM emerged for ASD and SLI and correlated only with performance on ACC3. Non-verbal reasoning was unrelated to syntactic measures.

This book offers an in-depth study of the overall syntax of (basilectal) Jamaican Creole, the first since Bailey (1966). The author, a Jamaican linguist, meticulously examines distributional and interpretative properties of functional morphology in Jamaican Creole (JC) from a cartographic perspective (Cinque 1999, 2002; Rizzi 1997, 2004), thus exploring to what extent the grammar of JC provides morphological manifestations of an articulate IP, CP and DP. The data considered in this work offers new evidence in favour of these enriched structural analyses, and the instances where surface orders differ from the underlying functional skeleton are accounted for in terms of movement operations. This investigation of Jamaican syntax therefore allows us to conclude that the 'poor' inflectional morphology typical of Creole languages in general and of (basilectal) Jamaican Creole in particular does not correlate with poor structural architecture. Indeed the free morphemes discussed, as well as the word order considerations that indicate syntactic movement to designated projections, serve as arguments in favour of a rich underlying functional map.

This study investigates effects of syntactic complexity operationalized in terms of movement, intervention, and noun phrase (NP) feature similarity in the development of Aʹ-dependencies in 4-, 6-, and 8-year-old typically developing (TD) French children and children with autism spectrum disorder. Children completed an offline comprehension task testing eight syntactic structures classified in four levels of complexity: Level 0: no movement; Level 1: movement without (configurational) intervention; Level 2: movement with intervention from an element that is maximally different or featurally “disjoint” (mismatched in both lexical NP restriction and number); and Level 3: movement with intervention from an element similar in one feature or featurally “intersecting” (matched in lexical NP restriction, mismatched in number). The results show that syntactic complexity affects TD children across the three age groups, but also indicate developmental differences between these groups. Movement affected all three groups in a similar way, but intervention effects in intersection cases were stronger in younger than in older children, with NP feature similarity affecting only 4-year-olds. Complexity effects created by the similarity in lexical restriction of an intervener thus appear to be overcome early in development, arguably thanks to other differences of this intervener (which was mismatched in number). Children with autism spectrum disorder performed less well than the TD children although they were matched on nonverbal reasoning. Overall, syntactic complexity affected their performance in a similar way as in their TD controls, but their performance correlated with nonverbal abilities rather than age, suggesting that their grammatical development does not follow the smooth relation to age that is found in TD children.

Impairments in Theory of Mind (ToM) are a core feature of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). ToM may be enhanced by various factors, including bilingualism, executive functions (EF), and complex syntax. This work investigates the language-cognition interface in ASD by exploring whether ToM can be enhanced by bilingualism, whether such ToM boosts would be due to EF or syntax, and whether routes to mentalizing would differ between bilinguals and monolinguals on the spectrum. Twenty-seven monolingual Greek-speaking and twenty-nine bilingual Albanian-Greek children with ASD were tested on ToM reasoning in verbal and low-verbal ToM tasks, an executive function 2-back task, and a sentence repetition task. Results revealed that bilingual children with ASD performed better than monolinguals with ASD in the low-verbal ToM and the 2-back tasks. In the sentence repetition task, bilinguals scored higher than monolinguals in complex sentences, and specifically in adverbials and relatives. Regarding the relations between ToM, EF, and sentence repetition, the monolingual group’s performance in the verbal ToM tasks was associated with complement syntax, whereas, for the bilingual children with ASD, performance in both verbal and low-verbal ToM tasks was associated with EF and adverbial clause repetition. The overall pattern of results suggests that mentalizing may follow distinct pathways across the two groups.