Setareh Mojahedi Rezaeian; Abbas Ali Ahangar; Peyman Hashemian; Mehrdad Mazaheri
Abstract
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD), as a developmental-neuro disorder, is a disorder that creates impairments in the cognitive performances, such as memory, communication ability and language. One of the determining levels in the individuals’ social life is the ability to produce narrative discourse ...
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Autism spectrum disorder (ASD), as a developmental-neuro disorder, is a disorder that creates impairments in the cognitive performances, such as memory, communication ability and language. One of the determining levels in the individuals’ social life is the ability to produce narrative discourse which entails applying linguistic and cognitive knowledge and skills simultaneously. The purpose of the present study was to provide a comparative study of the reference representation, as a narrative fundamental element, by using referential expressions based on the six cognitive statuses proposed in Gundel, Hedberg, & Zacharski’s (1993) “Givenness Hierarchy” in the narratives produced by Persian-speaking children with high-functioning autism (HFA) and typically developed (TD) children regarding their age. To this end, 24 children with high-functioning autism and 24 typically developed children, with the age 7, 9, 11 years old (each age group consisting of 8 subjects) were participated in this study. The narratives were elicited by the picture story book “Frog, where are you?” (Mayer, 1969). Then, the gathered data were analyzed by SPSS software. The results of the study indicated that there was differences between the two under study groups in representing the reference based on the cognitive statuses of “Givenness Hierarchy” by referential expressions. Furthermore, the age increase had no effect on the reference representation based on the cognitive statuses of “Givenness Hierarchy” in children with high-functioning autism’s narratives, in contrast to typically developed children’s narratives.
Abbas Ali Ahangar; Mahin Eslami Shahrbabaki; Setareh Mojahedi Rezaeian; Niloofar Sarmast
Abstract
Down syndrome (DS) disease is a genetic disorder which is caused by an additional copy of chromosome 21 in patient’s cell. These individuals face with different limitations in their social life such as disorders in discourse production and comprehension. The purpose of the present study was to ...
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Down syndrome (DS) disease is a genetic disorder which is caused by an additional copy of chromosome 21 in patient’s cell. These individuals face with different limitations in their social life such as disorders in discourse production and comprehension. The purpose of the present study was to provide a comparative investigation of comprehension of lexical relations device as one of cohesion devices, including hyponymy, part- whole and collocation, according to Dooley and Levinsohn (2000) between normal and educable DS Persian-speaking students’ narrative discourse. To this end, 20 normal and 20 DS boys and girls were purposefully selected using convenience sampling from ordinary and exceptional schools of Kerman city in Mehr 1395. The subjects were asked to talk about the topic of “Going to the park”. Then their speech was recorded by one of the researchers. The gathered data was analyzed by SPSS software. The research results showed that only in the comprehension of collocation there was a significantly meaningful difference between the two groups of subjects but this difference was not significantly meaningful in analyzing the lexical relations as a whole.