Department of Psychology, University of Connecticut, 406 Babbidge Road, Unit 1020, Storrs, CT 06269, USA.
J Child Lang. 2009 Nov;36(5):999-1021. doi: 10.1017/S0305000909009362. Epub 2009 Feb 19.
Language in autism has been the subject of intense interest, because communication deficits are central to the disorder, and because autism serves as an arena for testing theories of language acquisition. High-functioning older children with autism are often considered to have intact grammatical abilities, despite pragmatic impairments. Given the heterogeneity in language skills at younger ages, this assumption merits further investigation. Participants with autism (n=21, aged nine to seventeen years), matched on chronological age, receptive vocabulary and IQ, to 22 typically developing individuals, completed a grammaticality judgment task. Participants with autism were significantly less sensitive than controls, specifically for third person singular and present progressive marking. Performance interacted with sentence length, with lower sensitivity to errors occurring at the end of the longest stimulus sentences. Performance sensitivity was associated with onset of single word and phrase speech, and with severity of autistic symptomatology. Implications of findings are discussed.
自闭症患者的语言一直是研究的热点，因为交流障碍是自闭症的核心症状，同时自闭症也是检验语言习得理论的重要领域。尽管在语用方面存在障碍，高功能自闭症大龄儿童的语法能力往往被认为是完整的。鉴于在年幼时语言技能的异质性，这一假设值得进一步研究。本研究将 21 名自闭症患者（年龄 9 至 17 岁）与 22 名典型发育个体进行匹配，根据年龄、接受性词汇和智商进行匹配，完成了一项语法判断任务。与对照组相比，自闭症患者的敏感性显著降低，特别是在第三人称单数和现在进行时标记方面。表现与句子长度相互作用，在最长刺激句子的末尾出现错误时，敏感性较低。表现敏感性与单字和短语言语的起始以及自闭症症状的严重程度有关。研究结果的意义在讨论中进行了探讨。
