Nadig Aparna, Mulligan Anjali
McGill University School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, 2001 Avenue McGill College Suite 800, Montreal, Quebec, H3A 1G1, Canada; Centre for Research on Brain, Language & Music, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
McGill University School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, 2001 Avenue McGill College Suite 800, Montreal, Quebec, H3A 1G1, Canada.
J Commun Disord. 2017 Mar;66:13-21. doi: 10.1016/j.jcomdis.2017.03.003. Epub 2017 Mar 18.
We investigated whether enhanced auditory short-term memory may contribute to the learning of novel word forms in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. We also evaluated whether delayed but qualitatively normal, versus atypical, cognitive processes underlie non-word repetition in this population via a detailed error analysis.
English-speaking children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (who had significant language delay) and typically-developing children matched pairwise on language ability were compared on the Syllable Repetition Task (Shriberg et al., 2009).
All children exhibited better performance on stimuli of shorter vs. longer syllable length. In addition there was a significant interaction whereby children with Autism Spectrum Disorder performed better than typically-developing children at the longest syllable length. Repetition accuracy was significantly correlated with language level in both groups. In contrast, the relationship between Repetition accuracy and age was only marginally significant in the Autism Spectrum Disorder group and did not reach significance in the typically-developing group. This underscores the importance of language level to non-word repetition performance, and supports the practice of matching on language rather than age alone. An error analysis (Shriberg et al., 2012) showed many similarities between groups in terms of number of consonants deleted, encoding accuracy, and transcoding accuracy components of the task. However the Autism Spectrum Disorder group tended to display better auditory short-term memory with a medium effect size, though this did not reach significance given the small sample size.
These findings extend evidence of delayed but qualitatively normal non-word repetition previously described in preadolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder (Williams et al., 2013) to younger kindergarten-age children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and language delay, indicating that non-word repetition is not an area of specific difficulty for this population. With respect to enhanced auditory short-term memory, we found preliminary evidence of better memory for longer nonwords in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder compared to younger typically developing children who were matched on language.
我们研究了增强的听觉短期记忆是否有助于自闭症谱系障碍儿童学习新的单词形式。我们还通过详细的错误分析评估了延迟但质量正常与非典型认知过程是否是该人群非词重复的基础。
在音节重复任务（施里伯格等人，2009年）中，对患有自闭症谱系障碍（有明显语言延迟）的英语儿童和语言能力匹配的发育正常儿童进行了比较。
所有儿童在音节长度较短的刺激上表现都优于音节长度较长的刺激。此外，存在显著的交互作用，即自闭症谱系障碍儿童在最长音节长度时的表现优于发育正常儿童。两组的重复准确性与语言水平均显著相关。相比之下，重复准确性与年龄之间的关系在自闭症谱系障碍组中仅略微显著，在发育正常组中未达到显著水平。这突出了语言水平对非词重复表现的重要性，并支持仅根据语言而非年龄进行匹配的做法。错误分析（施里伯格等人，2012年）显示，两组在任务的辅音删除数量、编码准确性和转码准确性方面有许多相似之处。然而，自闭症谱系障碍组倾向于表现出更好的听觉短期记忆，效应量中等，不过鉴于样本量小，这一结果未达到显著水平。
这些发现将先前在患有自闭症谱系障碍的青少年前期儿童（威廉姆斯等人，2013年）中描述的延迟但质量正常的非词重复证据扩展到了患有自闭症谱系障碍和语言延迟的更年幼的幼儿园儿童，表明非词重复并非该人群的特定困难领域。关于增强的听觉短期记忆，我们发现了初步证据，表明与语言匹配的更年幼的发育正常儿童相比，自闭症谱系障碍儿童对更长非词的记忆更好。
