Investigating the relationship between language and picture understanding in children with autism spectrum disorder

Picture production was assessed by asking children to create representational drawings of unfamiliar objects and having raters identify their referents. The results of both picture tasks revealed statistically equivalent performance for typically developing children and children with autism spectrum disorder, and identical patterns of performance across trial types. These findings suggest that early deficits in pictorial understanding displayed by minimally verbal individuals may diminish as their expressive language skills develop.

Theoretically, our study indicates that development in linguistic and pictorial domains may be inter-related for children with autism spectrum disorder (as is the case for typical development).