Name: using the visual world paradigm to study sentence comprehension in mandarin-speaking children with autism
Uploaded: 2018-10-03T15:00:00
Description: Watch this Scientific Journal Video about Using the Visual World Paradigm to Study Sentence Comprehension in Mandarin-Speaking Children with Autism at JoVE.com

This work was funded by the National Social Science Foundation of China [16BYY076] to Peng Zhou and the Science Foundation of Beijing Language and Cultural University under the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [15YJ050003]. The authors are grateful to the children, parents, and teachers at the Enqi Autism Platform and Taolifangyuan Kindergarten in Beijing, China, for their support in running the study.

This study has been approved by the Ethics Committee of the School of Medicine at Tsinghua University. Informed consent has been obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
1. Participant Screening and Study Preparation
<ol>
	<li>Recruit Mandarin-speaking preschool children with autism. 
	NOTE: Their diagnoses should be confirmed by pediatric neurologists at hospitals using DSM-IV-TR40 or DSM-541 and, ideally, the numb...

     

In the current study, we present an eye-tracking paradigm that can directly and effectively assess the sentence comprehension abilities of children with autism. We found that 5-year-old children with autism, like their age-matched TD peers, exhibited eye gaze patterns that reflect effective and rapid use of linguistic cues during real-time sentence comprehension.
The findings provide evidence that eye-tracking (in particular, the visual world paradigm) is a sensitive measure of real-time sente...

Sentence comprehension relies on the ability to rapidly integrate different types of linguistic and non-linguistic information1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11. Prior research has found that young typically developing (TD) children incrementally compute the meaning of a sentence using both linguistic and non-linguistic cues12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19. However, there is currently a paucity of research exploring how preschool children with autism understand a sentence using different types of cues. The mechanisms underlying their sentence comprehension remains largely unclear.
It is generally acknowledged that there is enormous variability in the language abilities of children with autism, especially in their expressive language; for example, some children with autism have relatively good structural language, some exhibit deficits in both lexical and grammatical domains, some demonstrate impaired grammar, and some never acquire functional spoken language20,21,22,23,24,25. In addition, prior research seems to suggest that their receptive language is relatively more impaired than their expressive language26,27,28,29. Most research that has assessed sentence comprehension abilities of children with autism have used offline tasks (e.g., standardized tests, caregiver reports), and the findings suggest that their sentence comprehension abilities might be particularly impaired30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37. However, it has been pointed out that poor comprehension abilities are more likely related to these children&#39;s overall lack of social responsiveness than to language processing deficits38,39. Note that these offline tasks used in previous research often require high response demands or interactions with the experimenters, which might pose particular difficulties for children with autism, because they often exhibit various challenging behaviors or symptoms. As a result, this may interact with the high task and communication demands and mask their comprehension abilities [for an overview of methods for assessing receptive language in children with autism, see Kasari et al. (2013)27 and Plesa-Skwerer et al. (2016)29]. Thus, experimental paradigms that can better control these confounding factors are required to further understand the nature of sentence-processing mechanisms in autism.
In the current study, we present an eye-tracking paradigm that can directly and effectively assess sentence comprehension abilities of children with autism. Compared to offline tasks, eye-tracking is a more sensitive testing paradigm to demonstrate children&#39;s comprehension abilities. It is sensitive to the time course of the comprehension process and requires no explicit motor or language responses from the participant, making it a promising method to study younger children and minimally verbal children with autism. In addition, we record eye movements as automatic responses to linguistic input instead of measuring eye movements that accompany conscious responses to linguistic input.

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			<td class="xl63" height="63" style="height:47.25pt;width:162pt" width="216">EyeLink 1000 plus eye tracker&#160;</td>
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			<td class="xl64" style="width:125pt" width="167">&#160;The EyeLink 1000 plus allows remote eye tracking, without a head support. The eye tracker provides information about the participant&#8217;s point of gaze at a sampling rate of 500 Hz, and it has accuracy of 0.5 degrees of visual angle.&#160;</td>
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using the visual world paradigm to study sentence comprehension in mandarin-speaking children with autism

Sentence comprehension relies on the ability to rapidly integrate different types of linguistic and non-linguistic information. However, there is currently a paucity of research exploring how preschool children with autism understand sentences using different types of cues. The mechanisms underlying sentence comprehension remains largely unclear. The present study presents a protocol to examine the sentence comprehension abilities of preschool children with autism. More specifically, a visual world paradigm of eye-tracking is used to explore the moment-to-moment sentence comprehension in the children. The paradigm has multiple advantages. First, it is sensitive to the time course of sentence comprehension and thus can provide rich information about how sentence comprehension unfolds over time. Second, it requires minimal task and communication demands, so it is ideal for testing children with autism. To further minimize the computational burden of children, the present study measures eye movements that arise as automatic responses to linguistic input rather than measuring eye movements that accompany conscious responses to spoken instructions.

The present study uses minimal pairs as in Examples 1a and 1b to investigate if and how fast children with autism can use event information encoded in two morphological markers during real-time sentence comprehension. It was predicted that if they are able to rapidly and effectively use event information in the two markers during real-time sentence comprehension, then they should look more at the BA-target event when hearing BA than when hearing BEI. Also, they should fixate more on the B...

Watch this Scientific Journal Video about Using the Visual World Paradigm to Study Sentence Comprehension in Mandarin-Speaking Children with Autism at JoVE.com

Using the Visual World Paradigm to Study Sentence Comprehension in Mandarin-Speaking Children with Autism

We present a protocol to examine the use of morphological cues during real-time sentence comprehension by children with autism.

Sentence comprehension relies on the ability to rapidly integrate different types of linguistic and non-linguistic information. However, there is ...

These method can help answer key questions in understanding the language abilities of children with autism, such as whether they can understand a sentence using both linguistic and non-linguistic information. The main advantages of this method are that it is sensitive to the time code of sentence comprehension, and it requires minimal task and communication demand. This method simply records eye movements as automatic responses to linguistic input without asking participants to provide conscious judgments about the input, thus significantly reducing the computational model of participants.Begin by constructing test stimuli that consists of 12 visual target items, and two spoken sentences containing the morphological markers BA and BEI. Create a visual image from a template within the image editing software, in which each image contains two pictures. Double click the template to open it.Adjust the width, height, resolution, and color depth from the pop-up menus. Enter the relevant parameters. Then, reverse the event roles of the two characters in the two pictures.Click File Export. Next, set up the microphone and open the audio editing software to construct the spoken sentences. Select Record Mono Sound from the new menu.Set the recording conditions by clicking the Sample rate option of 44, 100 Hertz. Click the Record button. Finally, record the spoken sentences by asking a native Beijing Mandarin speaker to produce the sentences in a child-directed manner.Save the recordings by clicking Save. Begin by having the participant sit in front of the display monitor of the remote eye tracker. Set the distance between the participant's eyes and the monitor around 60 centimeters.Perform the standard calibration and validation procedures by asking the participants to fixate on a grid of five fixation targets in random succession. Then, ask the participant to listen to the spoken sentences while they are viewing the pictures. Have one experimenter to monitor the participant on the computer, and one to stand behind the participant and gently rest their hands on the participant's shoulders to minimize the participant's sudden movements.Next, have the participant complete the task to measure eye movements that arise as automatic responses to the linguistic input. After the task is complete, view the data and define two interest areas, BA target event area and BEI target event area, by selecting one of the interest area shape icons on the tool bar, and drawing a box around the region to be defined as an interest area. Save the interest area in the Interest Area set up folder.Finally, choose the Interest Period Manager from the menu to set the time window to every 200 milliseconds for analysis. Use the same function to time lock the fixation proportions in the interest areas to the onset of the marker for each trial, and use the Interest Area Report function to export the raw data into an Excel file. Use the Excel functions to average the fixation proportions following the onset of the marker for each area.Then, use the Excel functions to compute the fixation proportions in each time window of 200 milliseconds over a period of 5, 200 milliseconds from the onset of the marker for the two areas. Results indicate that the autism group displayed eye movement patterns similar to the age-matched TD group. Both groups exhibited more fixations on the BA target event when hearing BA then when hearing BEI, occurring after the onset of the object np and before the onset of the adverb.To be specific, the event occurred in the TD group during the window between 1, 400 and 1, 600 milliseconds. Whereas, the effect occurred in the autism group during the window between 1, 800 and 2, 000 milliseconds. After its development, the paradigm has been successfully used to test typical developing children's language abilities.Our lab has now extended the paradigm to the study of language comprehension abilities in pre-school children with autism. Keeping in mind that we're working with special populations, children with autism often exhibit various kinds of challenging behaviors or symptoms, in particular in unfamiliar environment, so extra care needs to be taken before and during the test. Prior to the experiment, it is important that the experimenters acclimate the participants to the experimental environment.During the test, the experimenters may need to redirect the participants and prompt them to rearrange to the computer screen several times.

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