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Several studies have now documented that signing children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) sometimes reverse the direction of their palm while signing American Sign Language (ASL). We sought to understand if such errors were associated with a specific cognitive-linguistic profile. 17 native-signing children with ASD (ages 5-14) and 24 typically-developing (TD), native-signing children (ages 6-13) were administered a battery of tasks measuring receptive and expressive language, nonverbal intelligence, and social cognition. Children with ASD produced more palm reversals than TD children (p <.05), and the five children with ASD who produced = 2 palm reversals had lower receptive language abilities than the 12 participants with ASD who produced =1 palm reversal errors (p =.01). The overall low rate of palm reversal errors is similar to studies finding that pronoun reversals occur relatively infrequently in hearing children with ASD (e.g., 4-6% of pronouns; Naigles et al, 2016), and our results align with studies that conclude that pronoun reversals are the product of delayed language development (e.g., Tager-Flusberg et al., 1990; Tek et al., 2014). Funding: NIDCD grant F32-DC011219 to A. Shield. |
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