Procedural Memory in Children with Autism Double Dissociation

Autism, which involves persistent deficits in social communication and behavioral flexibility, has been increasingly prevalent in recent years. Although considerable research on language in autism has focused on pragmatic impairments, few researchers have attempted to identify the link between memory and language impairments. Walenski, Tager Flusberg, and Ullman 2006 hypothesized that procedural memory deficit leads to grammatical impairments. Due to dearth of studies examining procedural memory across varied output modalities, the present investigation was planned. Thus, the main aim of this study was to investigate procedural memory across phonological and orthographic domains in children with autism. Ten children with high functioning autism aged from 7 17 years and typical controls were recruited as participants in the present study. Test for Examining Expressive Morphology Shipley, Stone and Sue, 1983 , consisting of true words, was used to investigate whether intact declarative memory takes over the function in the clinical group by correctly inflecting the target word verbally. In addition, Wug Test Berko, 1958 was administered to examine non word inflections in both clinical and control groups. Sentence completion tasks for both spoken and written modalities were administered to individual participants in a sound treated room. The findings of the the present study indicate that the clinical group obtained good scores on true word verbal tasks since they stored the word with suffixes as a whole unit in their relatively spared declarative memory. However, since non words are not stored in declarative memory, verbal performance of the clinical group on Wug Test was found to be impaired. Statistical analysis revealed no significant difference between the two groups on non word tasks in orthographic modality. This suggests that orthographic procedural memory is spared although the phonological counterpart is impaired in children with autism. Thus, double dissociation of written and spoken language processes in procedural memory is hypothesized. The potential implication of the present study is that procedural memory training using intact orthographic modality could enhance learning of morphological rules in children with autism. However, future studies on larger sample size across the spectrum is recommended to establish clinical implications. Dr. Maria Grace Treasa "Procedural Memory in Children with Autism: Double Dissociation?" Published in International Journal of Trend in Scientific Research and Development (ijtsrd), ISSN: 2456-6470, Volume-5 | Issue-4 , June 2021, URL: https://www.ijtsrd.compapers/ijtsrd42557.pdf Paper URL: https://www.ijtsrd.commedicine/other/42557/procedural-memory-in-children-with-autism-double-dissociation/dr-maria-grace-treasa