La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.
Int J Lang Commun Disord. 2011 Jan-Feb;46(1):108-19. doi: 10.3109/13682822.2010.484847. Epub 2010 Jun 21.
Despite somewhat spared structural language development in high-functioning autism, communicative comprehension deficits persist. Comprehension involves the integration of meaning: global processing is required. The Weak Central Coherence theory suggests that individuals with autism are biased to process information locally. This cognitive style may impair comprehension, particularly if inferencing is required. However, task performance may be facilitated by this cognitive style if local processing is required.
The current study was designed to examine the extent to which the 'weak central coherence' cognitive style affects comprehension and inferential processing of spoken narratives. The children with autism were expected to perform comparatively poorer on inferences relating to event scripts and comparatively better on inferences requiring deductive reasoning.
METHODS & PROCEDURES: Fourteen high-functioning children with autism were recruited from databases of various autism organizations (mean age = 6:7, 13 males, one female) and were matched on a receptive vocabulary and a picture-completion task with 14 typically developing children recruited from a local childcare centre (mean age = 4:10, seven males, seven females). The children were read short stories and asked questions about the stories.
OUTCOMES & RESULTS: Results indicated that the children with autism were less able to make inferences based on event scripts, but the groups did not differ significantly on inferences requiring deductive logical reasoning. Despite similar group performance on questions relating to the main idea of the stories, only for the typically developing group was good performance on extracting the main idea of the narratives significantly correlated with performance on all other comprehension tasks.
CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: Findings provide some support for the Weak Central Coherence theory and demonstrate that young children with autism do not spontaneously integrate information in order to make script inferences, as do typically developing children. These findings may help to explain communicative problems of young children with autism and can be applied to intervention programme development. More research on the link between a 'weak central coherence' cognitive style and communicative comprehension in autism will be valuable in understanding the comprehension deficits associated with autism.
尽管高功能自闭症患者的语言结构发展相对较好，但他们的交际理解能力仍存在缺陷。理解涉及意义的整合：需要全局处理。弱中央一致性理论认为，自闭症患者倾向于局部处理信息。这种认知风格可能会损害理解能力，尤其是在需要推理的情况下。然而，如果需要局部处理，这种认知风格可能会促进任务表现。
本研究旨在探讨“弱中央一致性”认知风格在多大程度上影响自闭症儿童对口语叙述的理解和推理加工。预计自闭症儿童在与事件脚本相关的推理上表现较差，而在需要演绎推理的推理上表现较好。
从各种自闭症组织的数据库中招募了 14 名高功能自闭症儿童（平均年龄=6:7，13 名男性，1 名女性），并根据接受性词汇和图片完成任务与从当地儿童保育中心招募的 14 名典型发展儿童进行匹配（平均年龄=4:10，7 名男性，7 名女性）。向孩子们朗读简短的故事，并询问他们关于故事的问题。
结果表明，自闭症儿童根据事件脚本进行推理的能力较差，但两组在需要演绎逻辑推理的推理上没有显著差异。尽管两组在与故事主旨相关的问题上表现相似，但只有典型发展组在提取故事主旨方面的良好表现与所有其他理解任务的表现显著相关。
研究结果为弱中央一致性理论提供了一些支持，并表明自闭症儿童不像典型发展儿童那样自发地整合信息以进行脚本推理。这些发现有助于解释自闭症儿童的沟通问题，并可应用于干预方案的开发。更多关于自闭症中“弱中央一致性”认知风格与交际理解之间联系的研究将有助于理解与自闭症相关的理解缺陷。
