Recognizing Autism Diagnostic Profiles through Visual Stimuli

To ensure that our elicitation material was recognizable to all participants vis-à-vis their autism diagnosis, age, and socio-cultural background, we first selected 50 potential visual stimuli. These were chosen based on the ‘Putonghua Communicative Development Inventory’ vocabulary checklist (Tardif et al., 2008 ), together with the results of two studies on functional echolalia by Brazilian children with ASD (Pascual et al., 2017 (link); Dornelas, 2018 ). These 50 images were presented to 175 Chinese parents of children with ASD, who scored each according to their children’s familiarity with the referents and recognition of the images using a Likert scale.
Based on this parental pre-test, we selected 12 professions (e.g., nurse) or (types of) individuals (e.g., baby) and 12 entities (e.g., birthday cake) with which the children were most familiar and that are commonly associated with fixed expressions in Mandarin Chinese (e.g., “da zhen!” ‘Give an injection!’, for the nurse; “sheng ri kuai le!” ‘Happy birthday!’ for the cake), see Figure 1 (All figures are found in the Supplementary materials folder).
A five-score Likert scale test on the children’s familiarity with the concepts and level of recognition of these designed images was filled in by the parents after the task, to prevent data contamination. Our eight participants were reported to be quite familiar with the concepts (Mean = 4.10, SD = 0.47) and to be able to recognize the images correctly (Mean = 4.14, SD = 0.44).