An ERP Study of Recursive Possessive Parsing in ASD Children and Its Cognitive Neuro Mechanisms

TL;DR

This ERP study reveals that children with ASD have specific deficits in syntactic processing of recursive structures, with preserved lexical-semantic processing, highlighting a modular dissociation in language functions.

Contribution

The study provides novel neurophysiological evidence of impaired syntactic recursion processing in ASD children, contrasting with preserved semantic processing.

Findings

ASD children show reduced P200 amplitudes indicating atypical early perception.

No N400 violation effect observed, suggesting semantic processing is intact.

ASD children exhibit reduced P600 amplitudes and delayed latency, indicating syntactic reanalysis deficits.

Abstract

Recursive structures are a core property of human language, yet little is known about how children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) process complex recursion. This ERP study investigated the online processing of two-level recursive possessive structures in Mandarin-speaking children with ASD (n = 12) compared to typically developing (TD) peers (n = 12) using a sentence-picture matching paradigm. ERPs were analyzed for P200 (150-250 ms), N400 (300-500 ms), and P600 (500-1000 ms). Results showed that ASD children exhibited significantly reduced P200 amplitudes and failed to show the typical posterior grammaticality effect, indicating atypical early perceptual processing. No robust N400 violation effect was observed in either group, confirming the mismatch was not a semantic anomaly; however, ASD children showed a reversed anterior effect and an attenuated posterior effect. For the P600, ASD children had significantly reduced amplitudes, no posterior grammaticality effect, and a trend toward delayed latency, reflecting a core deficit in syntactic reanalysis. These findings demonstrate that while lexical-semantic processing is relatively preserved in ASD, the online syntactic computation required for recursion is severely impaired, supporting modular dissociation accounts of language in autism.