Formula production and its relation to general language ability in Mandarin-speaking autistic children

This study explores the production of Mandarin pre-fabricated verbal formulae (i.e., fixed linguistic chunks stored in memory as units) in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder ('ASD'). Examples of such entrenchments are ritualized socio-cultural emblems (e.g., "Happy birthday!") and socio-communicative formulae (e.g., "Nice to meet you"). Prior studies have shown that formulaic sequences (a pre-stored linguistic unit produced as a whole rather than constructed word-by-word) may be pragmatically functional in adult speech, child speech, and language pathology (e.g., in aphasia). However, verbal formulae have barely been studied in autism speech. Using an elicitation study with visual stimuli, we compared the production of formulae by Mandarin-speaking high-verbal (n=41) and low-verbal (n=22) children with ASD. Most formulae (~90%) produced by both groups turned out to be ritualized conversational sequences directly associated with the target stimuli images. Thus, children with ASD seem to store lexical information together with entire socio-cultural scenes, with interjected verbal formulae forming a salient part of them. Based on this, we have found a strong positive cor-relation between the children with ASD's formula production and their language ability (p<0.001). This suggests that formulae may be a sign of language development in autism, as it is in the case of typically developing (TD) children, even though children with ASD do not develop this ability as fast as TD children. In sum, this study attests to the importance of recognizing formulaic language and its communicative significance in the development of language abilities in children with ASD.