Norbury Courtenay Frazier, Bishop Dorothy V M
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Int J Lang Commun Disord. 2002 Jul-Sep;37(3):227-51. doi: 10.1080/13682820210136269.
An investigation is reported into the story comprehension abilities of four groups of children: those with typical specific language impairment (SLI-T), those with pragmatic language impairments who were not autistic (PLI), those with high-functioning autism (HFA) and typically developing controls. The story comprehension task required children to answer questions about the literal content of the story, as well as questions involving two types of inferences: text-connecting and gap-filling. The control children outscored the three clinical groups on story comprehension, but the group means of the clinical groups did not differ. However, categorical examination of the data revealed that children with pragmatic difficulties related to HFA were more likely to have specific inferencing deficits. Error analysis suggested that all children could make inferences, but these were not always relevant to the story context. This supports the notion of weak central coherence underlying deficits in inferencing. There were no group differences on story recall. However, there was a strong relationship between story comprehension and recall, in that those who had better comprehension tended to have better recall. It is concluded that comprehension aids recall by enabling the listener to build a more stable mental representation of the story. The pragmatic deficits seen in autism compromise this process.
患有典型特定语言障碍的儿童（SLI-T）、患有非自闭症实用语言障碍的儿童（PLI）、高功能自闭症儿童（HFA）以及发育正常的对照组儿童。故事理解任务要求儿童回答有关故事文字内容的问题，以及涉及两种推理类型的问题：文本衔接和填补空白。对照组儿童在故事理解方面的得分高于三个临床组，但临床组的组均值没有差异。然而，对数据的分类检查显示，与高功能自闭症相关的有实用困难的儿童更有可能存在特定的推理缺陷。错误分析表明，所有儿童都能进行推理，但这些推理并不总是与故事情境相关。这支持了推理缺陷背后弱中央连贯性的概念。在故事回忆方面没有组间差异。然而，故事理解和回忆之间存在很强的关系，即理解较好的儿童往往回忆也较好。研究得出结论，理解通过使听众能够构建更稳定的故事心理表征来辅助回忆。自闭症中出现的实用缺陷损害了这一过程。
