An electrophysiological investigation of semantic incongruity processing by people with Asperger's syndrome.

Ring et al. (2007) watched brain waves while adults with Asperger's read short sentences.

Some sentences ended with the word you would expect. Others ended with a silly word.

The team compared the N400 brain wave to see if expected words felt surprising to the Asperger group.

Typical brains show a tiny N400 to expected words. The Asperger brains showed a big N400, as if the normal word did not fit.

This suggests they are not using the sentence context to predict the next word.

Manfredi et al. (2020) saw the same weak context use in children with ASD doing both sentences and picture stories. Their work extends this finding to younger kids and to images.

Ploog et al. (2007) looks like a contradiction. They found kids with autism could recall semantic info as well as peers. The difference is method: O used a memory test, not live brain waves. Memory can look fine even when moment-by-moment processing is shaky.

Yin et al. (2025) also recorded smaller N400s in Chinese children with ASD during metaphor tasks. The pattern holds across languages and types of meaning.

If clients do not use context to predict words, they may miss the main point of a conversation or story. You can help by pre-teaching key words, slowing your speech, and checking comprehension after every few sentences. Pair spoken words with pictures or written cues to give extra context that their brains do not generate on their own.