Perceptual Cues: Shape and Color
Other research shows that when children with ASD generalize names from pictures, they often do so based on atypical cues. In Hartley and Allen (2014a), children with and without ASD learned the names of unfamiliar objects depicted in photographs and were required to sort items according to whether or not they were also referents of the newly-learned names. While the TD controls only generalized labels to items that matched on shape (a category-defining cue), children with ASD frequently generalized to items that matched depicted objects on shape or color (a category-irrelevant cue). Thus, it appears that minimally-verbal children with ASD do not know intuitively what names refer to when paired with pictures (i.e., the picture itself, the depicted object’s shape, or the depicted object’s color) and their symbolic comprehension is significantly influenced by the type of picture. Taken together, these differences suggest that there might be an atypical route of word learning via pictures in ASD (see also Hartley and Allen, 2014b), but they leave open the question of whether media type (e.g., iPad or book) can impact the capacity for symbolic understanding.