Sukenik Nufar, Friedmann Naama
Language and Brain Lab, School of Education, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.
Front Psychol. 2018 Apr 4;9:279. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00279. eCollection 2018.
Do individuals with autism have a developmental syntactic impairment, DLI (formerly known as SLI)? In this study we directly compared the performance of 18 individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) aged 9;0-18;0 years with that of 93 individuals with Syntactic-Developmental Language Impairment (SyDLI) aged 8;8-14;6 (and with 166 typically-developing children aged 5;2-18;1). We tested them using three syntactic tests assessing the comprehension and production of syntactic structures that are known to be sensitive to syntactic impairment: elicitation of subject and object relative clauses, reading and paraphrasing of object relatives, and repetition of complex syntactic structures including Wh questions, relative clauses, topicalized sentences, sentences with verb movement, sentences with A-movement, and embedded sentences. The results were consistent across the three tasks: the overall rate of correct performance on the syntactic tasks is similar for the children with ASD and those with SyDLI. However, once we look closer, they are very different. The types of errors of the ASD group differ from those of the SyDLI group-the children with ASD provide various types of pragmatically infelicitous responses that are not evinced in the SyDLI or in the age equivalent typically-developing groups. The two groups (ASD and SyDLI) also differ in the pattern of performance-the children with SyDLI show a syntactically-principled pattern of impairment, with selective difficulty in specific sentence types (such as sentences derived by movement of the object across the subject), and normal performance on other structures (such as simple sentences). In contrast, the ASD participants showed generalized low performance on the various sentence structures. Syntactic performance was far from consistent within the ASD group. Whereas all ASD participants had errors that can originate in pragmatic/discourse difficulties, seven of them had completely normal syntax in the structures we tested, and were able to produce, understand, and repeat relative clauses, Wh questions, and topicalized sentences. Only one ASD participant showed a syntactically-principled deficit similar to that of individuals with SyDLI. We conclude that not all individuals with ASD have syntactic difficulties, and that even when they fail in a syntactic task, this does not necessarily originate in a syntactic impairment. This shows that looking only at the total score in a syntactic test may be insufficient, and a fuller picture emerges once the performance on different structures and the types of erroneous responses are analyzed.
患有自闭症的个体是否存在发育性句法障碍（DLI，以前称为SLI）？在本研究中，我们直接比较了18名年龄在9岁0个月至18岁0个月的自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）个体与93名年龄在8岁8个月至14岁6个月的句法发育性语言障碍（SyDLI）个体（以及166名年龄在5岁2个月至18岁1个月的发育正常儿童）的表现。我们使用三项句法测试对他们进行了测试，这些测试评估了已知对句法障碍敏感的句法结构的理解和生成：主语和宾语关系从句的引出、宾语关系从句的阅读和释义，以及复杂句法结构的重复，包括特殊疑问句、关系从句、主题化句子、动词移位句、A移位句和嵌入式句子。三项任务的结果是一致的：ASD儿童和SyDLI儿童在句法任务上的总体正确表现率相似。然而，当我们更仔细地观察时，他们非常不同。ASD组的错误类型与SyDLI组不同——ASD儿童提供了各种语用不恰当的回答，而这些回答在SyDLI组或年龄相当的发育正常组中并未出现。两组（ASD和SyDLI）在表现模式上也有所不同——SyDLI儿童表现出句法原则性的损伤模式，在特定句子类型（如宾语越过主语移位派生的句子）上有选择性困难，而在其他结构（如简单句）上表现正常。相比之下，ASD参与者在各种句子结构上的表现普遍较低。ASD组内的句法表现远不一致。虽然所有ASD参与者都有源于语用/语篇困难的错误，但其中7人在我们测试的结构中句法完全正常，并且能够生成、理解和重复关系从句、特殊疑问句和主题化句子。只有一名ASD参与者表现出与SyDLI个体类似的句法原则性缺陷。我们得出结论，并非所有ASD个体都有句法困难，即使他们在句法任务中失败，这也不一定源于句法障碍。这表明仅查看句法测试的总分可能是不够的，一旦分析了不同结构上的表现和错误回答的类型，就会呈现出更全面的情况。
