Background and aims Language abilities vary greatly across children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). In the present study, we investigate passive sentence comprehension, which has been underexplored among individuals with autism spectrum disorders and found to be delayed among other clinical populations. This study is the first to assess grammatical comprehension among Danish-speaking adolescents with autism spectrum disorders. Methods Fifteen Danish-speaking adolescents with autism (mean age: 14.9 years; age range: 13–18 years) participated in a picture selection task assessing comprehension of passive sentences relative to active sentences. We compared our findings for adolescents with autism spectrum disorders to those of 15 typically developing Danish-speaking adolescents matched for age and nonverbal reasoning as measured by the Matrix subtest of the WISC-IV/WAIS-IV. We also analyzed associations between passive comprehension and nonverbal reasoning. Results The results showed ceiling effects for both groups on all sentence types indicating that Danish adolescents with autism spectrum disorders do not face problems comprehending passive sentences. However, when considering variation within the autism spectrum disorder group, correct passive comprehension was highly significantly associated with nonverbal reasoning for the autism spectrum disorder group (r = .75), while this was not the case for the typically developing adolescents. Analyses of the few errors produced showed a preference for Theta-role reversal errors in the autism spectrum disorder and the typically developing groups. Conclusions Danish-speaking adolescents with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders do not show impairment in passive sentence comprehension. Correlation analyses however show that for adolescents with autism spectrum disorders, passive sentence comprehension is associated with nonverbal reasoning. We discuss how these results can be viewed as consistent with the few previous studies on passive comprehension in individuals with autism spectrum disorders. Implications Our study provides additional cross-linguistic evidence that passive comprehension is not problematic for individuals with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders. The finding of the relationship between nonverbal reasoning and passive sentence comprehension may inform clinical best practices as children with autism spectrum disorders who underperform in measures of nonverbal reasoning may benefit from additional receptive language screening.

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丹麦自闭症谱系障碍青少年成功的被动句理解

背景和目标自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）儿童的语言能力差异很大。在本研究中，我们调查了被动句理解，这在患有自闭症谱系障碍的个体中尚未得到充分研究，并在其他临床人群中被延迟。这项研究是首次评估自闭症谱系障碍的丹麦语青少年的语法理解能力。方法15名丹麦语自闭症青少年（平均年龄：14.9岁；年龄范围：13-18岁）参加了一项图片选择任务，评估被动句相对于主动句的理解力。我们将自闭症谱系障碍青少年的研究结果与15名通常发展为丹麦语的青少年进行了比较，这些研究结果与年龄和非言语推理相匹配，这由WISC-IV / WAIS-IV的Matrix子测验测得。我们还分析了被动理解与非语言推理之间的关联。结果结果表明，两组对所有句子类型的上限都有影响，这表明自闭症谱系障碍的丹麦青少年不会遇到理解被动句的问题。但是，当考虑自闭症谱系障碍人群中的变异时，自闭症谱系障碍人群的正确被动理解与非言语推理高度相关（r = .75），而通常发育中的青少年则并非如此。对产生的少量错误的分析表明，自闭症谱系障碍和典型的发育中的人群更喜欢Theta-role逆转错误。结论高功能自闭症谱系的丹麦语青少年没有表现出被动句理解能力受损。然而，相关分析表明，对于患有自闭症谱系障碍的青少年，被动句理解与非语言推理相关。我们讨论了如何将这些结果视为与先前关于自闭症谱系障碍患者的被动理解的一些研究相一致。启示我们的研究提供了更多的跨语言证据，表明被动理解对于患有自闭症谱系障碍的人没有问题。