Tek Saime, Jaffery Gul, Fein Deborah, Naigles Letitia R
Department of Psychology, University of Connecticut, Connecticut, USA.
Autism Res. 2008 Aug;1(4):208-22. doi: 10.1002/aur.38.
Many children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) acquire a sizeable lexicon. However, these children also seem to understand and/or store the meanings of words differently from typically developing children. One of the mechanisms that helps typically developing children learn novel words is the shape bias, in which the referent of a noun is mapped onto the shape of an object, rather than onto its color, texture, or size. We hypothesized that children with autistic disorder would show reduced or absent shape bias. Using the intermodal preferential looking paradigm , we compared the performance of young children with ASD and typically developing children (TYP), across four time points, in their use of shape bias. Neither group showed a shape bias at Visit 1, when half of the children in both groups produced fewer than 50 count nouns. Only the TYP group showed a shape bias at Visits 2, 3, and 4. According to the growth curve analyses, the rate of increase in the shape bias scores over time was significant for the TYP children. The fact that the TYP group showed a shape bias at 24 months of age, whereas children with ASD did not demonstrate a shape bias despite a sizeable vocabulary, supports a dissociation between vocabulary size and principles governing acquisition in ASD children from early in language development.
许多患有自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）的儿童会习得大量词汇。然而，这些儿童理解和/或存储单词含义的方式似乎与发育正常的儿童不同。帮助发育正常的儿童学习新单词的一种机制是形状偏好，即名词的指代对象被映射到物体的形状上，而不是其颜色、质地或大小。我们假设患有自闭症的儿童形状偏好会减弱或不存在。我们使用跨通道优先注视范式，在四个时间点比较了患有ASD的幼儿和发育正常的儿童（TYP）在形状偏好使用方面的表现。在第一次就诊时，两组均未表现出形状偏好，此时两组中各有一半儿童产出的可数名词少于50个。只有TYP组在第二次、第三次和第四次就诊时表现出形状偏好。根据生长曲线分析，TYP儿童的形状偏好得分随时间的增加率具有显著性。TYP组在24个月大时表现出形状偏好，而患有ASD的儿童尽管词汇量可观却未表现出形状偏好，这一事实支持了在语言发展早期，ASD儿童的词汇量与词汇习得原则之间的分离。
