Abstract
If language comprehenders hear the beginning of the sentence "the boy eats", they predict that an edible noun phrase, such as "the apple" will follow due to the lexical information provided by the verb. Research suggests that executive functions are positively related to predictions about other people’s beliefs (i.e., Theory of Mind; ToM). Since both executive functions and ToM are often found to be impaired in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), this may affect their ability to process predictions about linguistic events and could potentially explain why children with ASD experience problems with language and communication. Yet, this has not been investigated. The central questions of this project are whether children with ASD have problems with generating and processing predictions about upcoming linguistic materials, and, if so, whether these difficulties are related to difficulties with executive functions and ToM abilities. These questions will be investigated with four eye-tracking experiments in which children need to use lexical, structural and contextual information to generate linguistic predictions, and four cognitive tasks. Due to its high temporal precision eye-tracking is a very suitable online method for detecting difficulties with predictive processing. The language and communication problems of children with ASD are highly impairing in their everyday life. This project will provide new insights in the mechanisms underlying the language and communication difficulties of children with ASD by investigating a new hypothesis within the field of psycholinguistics and ASD, making use of online psycholinguistic methods. This makes the study both urgent and innovative.