Exploring Metalinguistic Awareness in School-Aged Autistic Children: Insights from Grammatical Judgment

Metalinguistic awareness, the ability to manipulate and reflect upon language, remains largely unexplored in the autistic population. To address this gap, this observational cross-sectional study examines the metalinguistic abilities of school-aged autistic children in comparison to neurotypical peers in a novel tablet-based Grammatical Judgment Task (GJT) of reduced linguistic complexity engaging two kinds of metacognitive resources. Children had to judge non-verbally whether pre-recorded sentences were grammatically correct or not, following the traditional GJT paradigm assessing metamorphosyntactic skills. In addition, sentences with anomalous meaning that were either grammatically correct or grammatically incorrect were introduced to test metasemantic knowledge. Findings reveal no difference in performance between the groups, with participants performing on average above chance level both on the sentences assessing mere metamorphosyntactic skills and on the sentences placing an additional demand on metasemantics. This study shows that autistic individuals are able to mobilize metalinguistic resources when tested via a task of reduced linguistic complexity.