Principal Investigator: Nazik Dinçtopal Deniz

Researchers: Mehtap Güven Çoban & Onur Keleş

Project Description: This project investigates the use of real-world knowledge and syntactic detail in language comprehension by individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Previous accounts of language processing (Karimi & Ferreira, 2016) suggest that typically developed (TD) individuals’ language comprehension rely on the interaction of good-enough parsing and deep syntactic algorithms. The “good-enough” processing approach underlines the tendency to make superficial analyses of linguistic input, which may result in inaccurate interpretations (Ferreira, 2016). This approach maintains that sentence processing for TD individuals does not always include complex syntactic detail and sometimes proceeds with good-enough parsing which is mainly informed by semantic information. However, much less is known about individuals with ASD, specifically with respect to their use of real-world knowledge, syntactic and semantic information in language processing.