Martzoukou Maria, Papadopoulou Despina, Kosmidis Mary-Helen
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece.
J Psycholinguist Res. 2017 Dec;46(6):1573-1595. doi: 10.1007/s10936-017-9500-4.
The present study investigates the comprehension of syntactic and affective prosody in adults with autism spectrum disorder without accompanying cognitive deficits (ASD w/o cognitive deficits) as well as age-, education- and gender-matched unimpaired adults, while processing orally presented sentences. Two experiments were conducted: (a) an on-line sentence completion task containing local subject/object ambiguities and (b) an affective prosody task exploring the comprehension of six emotions. The syntactic prosody task revealed that the experimental group performed similar to the control group on the fillers and the object condition. On the other hand, the ASD w/o cognitive deficits group manifested lower accuracy compared to the unimpaired controls in the subject reading condition, as well as slower reaction times in all conditions. In the affective prosody task, the experimental group performed significantly worse than the controls in the recognition of the emotion of surprise, whereas no differences between the experimental and the control group were attested in the recognition of all other emotions. A positive correlation was found between the two tasks in the ASD w/o cognitive deficits group. Thus, individuals with ASD w/o cognitive deficits face slight difficulties with the decoding of prosody, both the syntactic and the affective one. More specifically, these difficulties are attested in the most difficult conditions, i.e. the subject reading and the emotion of surprise.
本研究调查了无伴随认知缺陷的自闭症谱系障碍成年人（ASD无认知缺陷）以及年龄、教育程度和性别匹配的未受损成年人在处理口头呈现的句子时对句法韵律和情感韵律的理解。进行了两项实验：（a）一个包含局部主语/宾语歧义的在线句子完成任务，以及（b）一个探索六种情感理解的情感韵律任务。句法韵律任务显示，实验组在填充词和宾语条件下的表现与对照组相似。另一方面，ASD无认知缺陷组在主语阅读条件下的准确率低于未受损对照组，并且在所有条件下的反应时间都较慢。在情感韵律任务中，实验组在识别惊讶情绪方面的表现明显比对照组差，而在识别所有其他情绪方面，实验组和对照组之间没有差异。在ASD无认知缺陷组中，两项任务之间存在正相关。因此，ASD无认知缺陷的个体在韵律解码方面面临轻微困难，包括句法韵律和情感韵律。更具体地说，这些困难在最困难的条件下得到证实，即主语阅读和惊讶情绪。
