Symposium for Undergraduate Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity 2007
The Influence of Semantic and Perceptual Features in a Categorization Task with Autistic Children
Previous research with autistic children has been equivocal with respect to a deficit in semantic categorization. The purpose of this study was to determine if autistic children have a deficit in semantic categorization and if perceptual features interfere with this process. In this study, two autistic children (ages 10 and 15), a developmentally delayed child (age 8), and a normal child (age 12), categorized 10 pairs of picture sets. The child’s task was to respond to a set of questions about the similarity of the images. Each set contained four pictures with one picture that did not belong. Results show that the autistic children were able to semantically categorize, however, they were also influenced by the perceptual features more than the non-autistic children. These results are consistent with earlier results with the HAL model that showed that similarity was learnable from children’s autistic language input (Zacky & Burgess, 2004). |
