Järvinen-Pasley Anna, Peppé Susan, King-Smith Gavin, Heaton Pamela
Goldsmiths College, University of London, London, UK.
J Autism Dev Disord. 2008 Aug;38(7):1328-40. doi: 10.1007/s10803-007-0520-z. Epub 2008 Jan 3.
Prosody can be conceived as having form (auditory-perceptual characteristics) and function (pragmatic/linguistic meaning). No known studies have examined the relationship between form- and function-level prosodic skills in relation to the effects of stimulus length and/or complexity upon such abilities in autism. Research in this area is both insubstantial and inconclusive. Children with autism and controls completed the receptive tasks of the Profiling Elements of Prosodic Systems in Children (PEPS-C) test, which examines both form- and function-level skills, and a sentence-level task assessing the understanding of intonation. While children with autism were unimpaired in both form and function tasks at the single-word level, they showed significantly poorer performance in the corresponding sentence-level tasks than controls. Implications for future research are discussed.
韵律可以被理解为具有形式（听觉感知特征）和功能（语用/语言意义）。目前尚无已知研究考察自闭症中刺激长度和/或复杂性对形式和功能层面韵律技能的影响之间的关系。该领域的研究既不充分也无定论。自闭症儿童和对照组儿童完成了儿童韵律系统剖析要素（PEPS-C）测试的接受性任务，该测试考察了形式和功能层面的技能，以及一项评估语调理解的句子层面任务。虽然自闭症儿童在单词层面的形式和功能任务中均未受损，但他们在相应的句子层面任务中的表现明显比对照组差。文中讨论了对未来研究的启示。
