Department of Hearing, Speech, and Language Sciences, Sorenson Language and Communication Center, Gallaudet University, Washington, DC, USA.
Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA.
J Intellect Disabil Res. 2021 Feb;65(2):125-132. doi: 10.1111/jir.12801. Epub 2020 Dec 6.
Pronouns are referentially ambiguous (e.g. she could refer to any female), yet they are common in everyday conversations. Individuals with typical development (TD) employ several strategies to avoid pronoun interpretation errors, including the subject bias - an assumption that a pronoun typically refers to the subject (or, with the closely related order-of-mention bias, the first-mentioned character) of the previous sentence. However, it is unknown if adults with intellectual disability (ID) share this strategy or the extent to which the subject bias is associated with non-verbal abilities or receptive vocabulary.
We tested 22 adults with mixed-aetiology ID on their interpretation of ambiguous pronouns using the visual world eye-tracking paradigm and by asking a follow-up pronoun interpretation question. A group of TD adults was also tested to establish the strength of the subject bias with our materials and task.
Adults with ID did demonstrate the subject bias, but it was significantly less robust than that seen in TD. For participants with ID, the subject bias was influenced by non-verbal IQ and receptive vocabulary at different stages of processing.
Given the frequency of pronouns in conversation, strengthening the subject bias may help alleviate discourse and reading comprehension challenges for individuals with ID, particularly those with lower non-verbal and/or vocabulary skills.
代词在指代上是模糊的（例如，“她”可以指代任何女性），但它们在日常对话中很常见。具有典型发展（TD）的个体使用几种策略来避免代词解释错误，包括主语偏向——即一个代词通常指代前一个句子的主语（或者与主语偏向密切相关的提及顺序偏向，即第一个提到的人物）。然而，目前尚不清楚智力障碍（ID）成年人是否具有这种策略，或者主语偏向与非言语能力或接受性词汇量的关联程度。
我们使用视觉世界眼动追踪范式和后续代词解释问题，测试了 22 名具有混合病因 ID 的成年人对模糊代词的解释。还测试了一组 TD 成年人，以用我们的材料和任务确定主语偏向的强度。
ID 成年人确实表现出主语偏向，但与 TD 相比，他们的主语偏向明显较弱。对于 ID 参与者，主语偏向在不同的加工阶段受到非言语智商和接受性词汇量的影响。
鉴于代词在对话中的高频率，加强主语偏向可能有助于减轻 ID 个体的话语和阅读理解挑战，尤其是那些非言语和/或词汇技能较低的个体。
