Concreteness effect in the character reading of Chinese-speaking children with and without ASD

Abstract

Purpose –The Dual-Code theory suggests that concrete words and easier and faster to process as they are coded in both image and word format while abstract words are coded in word format only. It also suggests that imaginability influences concreteness. However, the Context Availability view argues that the effect is driven by the strength of verbal semantic associations with the context. Chinese characters are compounded to make new words, and the number of word formations can be an indicator of context availability. The study aims examine the concreteness effect in children. In addition, children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have weak lexical semantic knowledge, and therefore unclear whether they perceive concreteness to the same extent as their typically developing peers. Method – 51 typical developing (TD) children and 26 children with ASD aged from 5 to 9 were instructed to read aloud 142 Chinese characters. Accuracy data were analyzed using general mixed-effect modeling to investigate the concreteness effect in relation to age, age of acquisition (AoA), imaginability, number of word formation, and character frequency. Results – Concreteness effects were found in both TD and ASD groups. Greater concreteness differences were also found with increasing age and imaginability, and for early acquired words in TD children. While in the ASD group, concreteness was found to only be affected by AoA. Conclusions – The results support the Dual-code theory as concreteness was influenced by imaginability but not the number of word formations. The absence of concreteness and imaginability interaction in ASD children might indicate that semantics deficits is linked to their indifference towards the associations between words and their visual properties.