Jolliffe T, Baron-Cohen S
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, UK.
Cognition. 1999 Jun 22;71(2):149-85. doi: 10.1016/s0010-0277(99)00022-0.
Central coherence theory (Frith, U., 1989. Autism: Explaining the Enigma. Blackwell, Oxford.) is addressed by exploring linguistic processing in normally intelligent adults with either autism or Asperger syndrome, to test whether local coherence is impaired. Local coherence is the ability to make contextually meaningful connections between linguistic information in short-term or working memory. Experiment 1 demonstrated that individuals with an autism spectrum condition were less likely to use the sentence context spontaneously to provide the context-appropriate pronunciation of a homograph. Experiment 2 presented scenarios which had a situation and outcome which only cohered if a bridging inference was drawn. The clinical groups were less likely to select the most coherent (bridging) inference from competing alternatives. Experiment 3 demonstrated that individuals with an autism spectrum condition were less able to use context to interpret an auditorily presented ambiguous sentence. The findings from Experiments 2 and 3 suggest that individuals with autism or Asperger syndrome have a difficulty in achieving local coherence, while the evidence from Experiment 1 suggests a preference not to strive for coherence. Taken together, these results suggest that individuals with an autism spectrum condition are impaired in achieving local coherence, and they have a preference not to strive for coherence unless instructed to do so, or unless they make a conscious decision to do so. Moreover, the three experiments correlate with one another, which suggests that central coherence may be a unitary force in these different tasks. Of the two clinical groups, the autism group had the greater difficulty in achieving coherence. Possible explanations for the clinical groups' difficulty are explored.
通过研究患有自闭症或阿斯伯格综合征的智力正常成年人的语言处理过程，来探讨中心连贯性理论（弗里思，U.，1989年。《自闭症：解开谜团》。牛津布莱克韦尔出版社），以测试局部连贯性是否受损。局部连贯性是指在短期或工作记忆中，将语言信息建立上下文有意义联系的能力。实验1表明，患有自闭症谱系障碍的个体不太可能自发地利用句子上下文来提供同形异义词在上下文中合适的发音。实验2呈现了一些场景，这些场景有一个情境和结果，只有做出搭桥推理时才连贯。临床组从相互竞争的选项中选择最连贯（搭桥）推理的可能性较小。实验3表明，患有自闭症谱系障碍的个体较难利用上下文来解释听觉呈现的歧义句。实验2和3的结果表明，患有自闭症或阿斯伯格综合征的个体在实现局部连贯性方面存在困难，而实验1的证据表明他们倾向于不追求连贯性。综合来看，这些结果表明，患有自闭症谱系障碍的个体在实现局部连贯性方面受损，并且他们倾向于不追求连贯性，除非得到指示这样做，或者除非他们有意识地决定这样做。此外，这三个实验相互关联，这表明中心连贯性可能是这些不同任务中的一种统一力量。在这两个临床组中，自闭症组在实现连贯性方面困难更大。文中探讨了临床组出现困难的可能原因。
