Coderre Emily L, Cohn Neil, Slipher Sally K, Chernenok Mariya, Ledoux Kerry, Gordon Barry
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, United States; Cognitive Neurology/Neuropsychology, Department of Neurology, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, United States.
Tilburg Center for Cognition and Communication (TiCC), Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands.
Brain Lang. 2018 Nov;186:44-59. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2018.09.001. Epub 2018 Sep 11.
Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have notable language difficulties, including with understanding narratives. However, most narrative comprehension studies have used written or spoken narratives, making it unclear whether narrative difficulties stem from language impairments or more global impairments in the kinds of general cognitive processes (such as understanding meaning and structural sequencing) that are involved in narrative comprehension. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we directly compared semantic comprehension of linguistic narratives (short sentences) and visual narratives (comic panels) in adults with ASD and typically-developing (TD) adults. Compared to the TD group, the ASD group showed reduced N400 effects for both linguistic and visual narratives, suggesting comprehension impairments for both types of narratives and thereby implicating a more domain-general impairment. Based on these results, we propose that individuals with ASD use a more bottom-up style of processing during narrative comprehension.
患有自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）的个体存在明显的语言困难，包括理解叙述方面。然而，大多数叙述理解研究使用的是书面或口头叙述，这使得尚不清楚叙述困难是源于语言障碍还是源于参与叙述理解的一般认知过程（如理解意义和结构顺序）中更广泛的障碍。我们使用事件相关电位（ERP），直接比较了患有ASD的成年人与发育正常（TD）的成年人对语言叙述（短句）和视觉叙述（漫画）的语义理解。与TD组相比，ASD组在语言和视觉叙述中均表现出N400效应降低，这表明两种类型的叙述都存在理解障碍，从而暗示存在更普遍的领域性障碍。基于这些结果，我们提出患有ASD的个体在叙述理解过程中使用的是一种更自下而上的加工方式。
