Analyzing the Comprehension of Active and Passive Structures in Persian Autistic Children

Research In autism has not focused on linguistics, specially grammatical impairment in depth. However representing language profile is essential to recognition and treatment of autisitc children. Due to wide heterogeneity in autism, extensive investigations are required across different language groups. Passive structure is one of the most interesting structures among the developmental researchers. This paper aims to evaluate the comprehension of active and passive structures in Persian autistic children. For this purpose, comprehension of passive and active sentences in 10 autistic children of 6-10 years old was studied and compared to that of children -at similar age- with typical development. First children were presented with four pictures for each of the 13 sentences chosen for this study. Then, active and passive sentences were expressed conversationally and children were asked to choose a picture matching the sentence they heard and their answers were recorded. The Results showed that there was a significant difference between autistic and non-autistic children in comprehension of passive and reversal active sentences (P0.05). There was no significant difference between the two groups in comprehension of structures active sentences (P>0.05) but there was a significant difference in comprehension of passive sentence (P