Issues in the acquisition of binding, control and raising in high-functioning children with autism

In this study, we test 12 high-functioning children with autism (HFA), aged 12-16, on a picture selection task assessing comprehension of binding and compare their performance on this construction with that on an already conducted, similarly designed task testing comprehension of obligatory control (Janke and Perovic (submitted)). We compare the children’s performance on these two tasks to that of a younger gender- and verbal MA-matched typically developing (TD) group. No difference between the groups’ performance was found, with both performing at ceiling on the two tasks. By comparing comprehension of two constructions which share a number of syntactic properties, these results provide further corroboration for the claim in Janke and Perovic (submitted) and Perovic, Modyanova and Wexler (2013 a) that certain syntactic dependencies in high-functioning individuals with autism are intact. This contribution is of clinical import, as it provides practitioners with a more precise profile of advanced grammatical abilities. The paper’s theoretical significance lies with its division between binding and control on the one hand and raising on the other. While binding and obligatory control pattern together in our sample, research using the same paradigm on a different sample of children, also high-functioning and with an age range of 10-16, show an impaired comprehension of raised structures relative to unraised structures and fillers (Perovic, Modyanova & Wexler, 2007). We hypothesise that the source of this difference lies with the extra degree of complexity in raising that is absent from binding and control: raising involves argument displacement.