Cartoon scenes are frequently presented in picture books as a benefit for language development. However, it is unclear if autistic and typical developing children (ASD and TD, respectively) use different processing strategies accordingly. The study focused on how ASD and TD children examine the emotion-evoking areas in scenes for recognizing emotions. The research included 5 cartoon scenes as the study materials and recruited 91 ASD children and 121 TD children to participate in the study. The results revealed as following:1. ASD children showed lower accuracy in emotions recognition than TD children. 2. TD children showed greater gazing time on faces. 3. ASD children showed greater gazing time on emotion-evoking areas. Based on the findings, it is implied that ASD children and TD children use different gazing strategies which could have different impacts on the accuracy for emotion recognition in cartoon scenes.

The purpose of this study is to examine Theory of Mind (ToM) in processing the Chinese implicit causality verbs. The Experiment identified the Chinese causal verbs of high tendency by using a bias decision task to the ToM paradigms (Reading the Mind in the Eyes test revised and YONI task) to explore the relationship among English proficiency, Theory of Mind, and causal verb processing. The main results are: Proficiency in both English and Chinese can affect one’s interpretation of the Chinese implicit causality/consequentiality. On the other hand, the affective ability of ToM is enhanced as the English proficiency increases due to the understanding of the implicit causes/effects of the same concept under the context of the different languages. The study suggests that Chinese-English have different processing mechanisms from the monolinguals for the judgment of the implicit causality verbs.

Very few studies have focused on the stimuli materials for social situations to understand if contextual cues have impacts on the gaze patterns of children with ASD to investigate the emotion recognition performance. This study investigated the performance across 2 age groups (preschool, school age) between ASD and typically developing (TD) children by using eye-tracking techniques and recording recognition accuracy for different areas of interest (AOI). The performance of ASD (n=91) and TD (n=155) participants were observed while asked to identify emotions in a context, including happy, sad, anger, fear, and surprise. The results showed no significant relationship between age and correct rate; but ASD groups actually spent more time on faces to recognize emotions compared to TD groups. The findings highlighted the greater effects of social experience on TD groups, leading to correctly identify emotions despite less gazing time for scanning faces.

Among the interpersonal verbs, there is a class of causal verbs with implicit causality and implicit consequentiality, which can refer to the cause and effect of an event on the subject or the object of a sentence. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether focus or integration theory is supported by examining the interplay within Chinese causal verb processing. The study collected 36 participants and used an eye tracker in a visual world paradigm to understand the processing of causal verbs. The results indicated that, different from English, the processing of causal verbs in Chinese supported integration theory.