School of Health Sciences, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.
Department of Human Communication, Development and Hearing, The University of Manchester, Ellen Wilkinson Building, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK.
J Autism Dev Disord. 2020 May;50(5):1639-1656. doi: 10.1007/s10803-019-03920-6.
Understanding the nature of language and communication disorders in High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder (HFASD) populations may provide insight into why females are more likely than males to go undiagnosed. Language and communication skills were compared between 13 females and 13 males (aged 8.11-11.06) with HFASD. Gender-normative data was also ascertained from 26 typically developing children (TD) matched for age and gender. All children had typical range PIQ, slight variation here was controlled for in analysis. Results show females outperforming males in pragmatic and semantic tasks and in certain language-of-emotion tasks. TDs outperformed HFASDs in above-sentence level tasks, but not in basic vocabulary or sentence level tasks. This study highlights specific strengths/weaknesses in language and communication for female HFASD, which could aid more accurate identification of the female autistic phenotype. It indicates the need for larger follow up studies in this area.
理解高功能自闭症谱系障碍（HFASD）人群中语言和交流障碍的性质，可能有助于了解为什么女性比男性更不容易被诊断出来。比较了 13 名女性和 13 名男性（年龄 8.11-11.06 岁）HFASD 患者的语言和沟通技能。还从 26 名年龄和性别匹配的典型发育儿童（TD）中确定了性别规范数据。所有儿童的 PIQ 均处于正常范围，分析中控制了这种轻微的变化。结果表明，女性在语用和语义任务以及某些情感语言任务中的表现优于男性。TD 在高于句子水平的任务中表现优于 HFASD，但在基本词汇或句子水平任务中并非如此。这项研究强调了女性 HFASD 在语言和交流方面的特定优势/劣势，这有助于更准确地识别女性自闭症表型。它表明该领域需要进行更大规模的后续研究。
