Whitehouse Andrew J O, Maybery Murray T, Durkin Kevin
University of Western Australia, Australia.
Autism. 2007 May;11(3):241-54. doi: 10.1177/1362361307076860.
This article tests the hypothesis that individuals with autism poorly encode verbal information to the semantic level of processing, instead paying greater attention to phonological attributes. Participants undertook a novel explicit verbal recall task. Twenty children with autism were compared with 20 matched typically developing children. On each trial, 20 words were presented individually on a computer screen. Half of the items were related through having either a common semantic theme, or a common phonological feature. Following a filler task, the participants were presented with a cue and asked to recall items consistent with the cue. No differences between the autism and comparison groups were found in either the semantic or the phonological condition. A follow-up comparison revealed that the participants with autism showed comparable levels of recall to an additional group of children matched in chronological age. The findings do not support the idea of a developmental delay in semantic encoding in children with autism.
本文检验了这样一种假设，即自闭症患者难以将言语信息编码至语义加工水平，而是更关注语音属性。参与者进行了一项新颖的显性言语回忆任务。将20名自闭症儿童与20名匹配的发育正常儿童进行比较。在每次试验中，20个单词分别呈现在电脑屏幕上。其中一半的项目通过具有共同的语义主题或共同的语音特征而相互关联。在完成一项填充任务后，向参与者呈现一个线索，并要求他们回忆与该线索一致的项目。在语义或语音条件下，自闭症组和对照组之间均未发现差异。一项后续比较显示，自闭症参与者的回忆水平与另一组按年龄匹配的儿童相当。这些发现不支持自闭症儿童在语义编码方面存在发育延迟的观点。
