Event-related Potentials on Semantic Processing for Sentence Comprehension in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Abstract

This study investigated the semantic processing of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Event-related potentials (ERP) with children performing silent reading tasks were analyzed. Furthermore, we used descriptive tests to require participants to answer whether a sentence was correct and to correctly rewrite the incorrect sentences. According to an analysis of ERP, the ASD group demonstrated significantly smaller N400 amplitudes compared with the typically developing (TD) group. However, no significant differences between the groups were observed in the percentage of correct answers on descriptive tests. These results suggest that children with ASD have a peculiarity of neural processing for semantically incongruent words, although they can determine whether sentences are correct or incorrect, which is similar to the TD children.