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Degree

MA, University of Cincinnati, Arts and Sciences: Psychology, 2011.

Abstract

Autism is a pervasive developmental disorder characterized by disrupted language development, social deficits, and atypical patterns of interacting with objects. Evidence suggests that this stems from a tendency for children with autism to not focus on relationships between details in their environments (e.g., Happé & Booth, 2008). Typically developing (TD) children, on the other hand, tend to focus on overall impressions, a bias that appears to follow a prescribed developmental course. For example, while early on TD children tend to focus on fine grain detail to categorize objects, later on they focus on an objects’ overall shape (Pereira & Smith, 2009; Smith, 2003). The current study investigates whether the same developmental progression holds for children with autism. In particular, the study explores how the vocabulary size of children with autism relates to their ability to categorize objects on the basis of their overall shape (vs. fine-grain detail) and how this relation compares to typically developing children. This is a first step towards mapping out the relation between autism and the development of an adaptive tendency to detect higher-order Gestalts.

Subject Headings

Clinical Psychology

Keywords

autism; language; shape-bias; development

Committee / Advisors

Adelheid Kloos, PhD (Committee Chair)
Sarah Whitton, PhD (Committee Member)
Laura Nabors, PhD (Committee Member)
Guy Van Orden, PhD (Committee Member)

Pages

51p.

Document number: ucin1321370900
Permalink: http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1321370900

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