“The autistic child population does not expect two objects, simply because they merely share a name, to have common properties or are the same type of object. They are not sensitive to categorisation through the language they are being offered,” said Agustín Vicente, Ikerbasque Research Professor and researcher in the UPV/EHU's Lindy Lab group. “If the autistic population displays difficulties in deducing that two objects with the same name form a category, they may tend to generate concepts that do not coincide with those of the rest of the children and this may lead to difficulties in communication, among other things,” added Vicente.

During their childhood neurotypical individuals, those who conform to the socially typical standards of cognitive and communicative behaviour, are sensitive to the so-called linguistic labelling effect. Let's take two different types of hoovers as an example: “If we tell a neurotypical child that a Dyson and a Roomba are two hoovers, they will expect them to do the same thing, in this case hoover. But if we don't tell them and simply call one a Dyson and the other a Roomba, if they see us hoovering with the Dyson, they may not expect that we can also hoover with the Roomba,” explained Vicente. “By assigning a linguistic label, a name, to it, a link is established between the properties of that object and the assigned label,” added Sergio Parrillas, a pre-doctoral researcher in the UPV/EHU’s Lindy Lab group. “When shown a second object with the same label, regardless of how different it may be from the first object or similar to it, the child expects it to perform the same function, in this case to hoover. However, if they are presented with a very similar object, but with a different label or name, they do not generalise the hoovering function to the new object, and interpret them as belonging to different categories.

So “sharing a name is a more powerful categorisation criterion than having a similar appearance. This phenomenon is important because it acts as a source of concept acquisition through language”, stressed the UPV/EHU researcher.

In neurotypical children this occurs from the age of 10 months onwards, and this study aimed to find out whether the acquisition of concepts through language also occurs in children on the autistic spectrum aged between 3 and 9 years.  The results suggest that, in contrast to neurotypical children, no sensitivity to the labelling effect could be identified in the autistic child population.

The linguistic labelling effect is an important source of concept acquisition and may predict important aspects of language development, such as acquisition and range of vocabulary. That is why the two Lindy Lab researchers stress the need for further research into the relationship between language and concepts in the autistic mind. “Research into why some children on the autistic spectrum have such a poor and referentially imprecise vocabulary may contribute towards the development of intervention programmes in the future to enable them to communicate better, with a broader and better organised vocabulary,” added Sergio Parrillas and Agustin Vicente.

Additional information

This study is based on the Master's dissertation by Sergio Parrillas in the Lindy Lab laboratory, which is part of the UPV/EHU’s Basque Research Group of Theoretical Linguistics (HiTT); the work earned him the 5th Izaskun Heras Prado award. Sergio Parrillas is autistic and currently has a pre-doctoral contract with the Basque Government to write up a PhD thesis, supervised by the Ikerbasque Research Professor Agustín Vicente (UPV/EHU) and the researcher Irene de la Cruz Pavía (Deusto).