Kuijper Sanne J M, Hartman Catharina A, Hendriks Petra
Inclusive and Special Needs Education Unit, Department of Pedagogical and Educational Sciences, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands.
Department of Psychiatry, Interdisciplinary Center Psychopathology and Emotion Regulation (ICPE), University of Groningen, University Medical Center Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands.
Front Psychol. 2021 Jun 4;12:610401. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.610401. eCollection 2021.
In several languages, including English and Dutch, children's acquisition of the interpretation of object pronouns (e.g., ) is delayed compared to that of reflexives (e.g., ). Various syntactic and pragmatic explanations have been proposed to account for this delay in children's acquisition of pronoun interpretation. This study aims to provide more insight into this delay by investigating potential cognitive mechanisms underlying this delay. Dutch-speaking children between 6 and 12 years old with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; = 47), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD; = 36) or typical development (TD; = 38) were tested on their interpretation and production of object pronouns and reflexives and on theory of mind, working memory, and response inhibition. It was found that all three groups of children had difficulty with pronoun interpretation and that their performance on pronoun interpretation was associated with theory of mind and inhibition. These findings support an explanation of object pronoun interpretation in terms of perspective taking, according to which listeners need to consider the speaker's perspective in order to block coreference between the object pronoun and the subject of the same sentence. Unlike what is predicted by alternative theoretical accounts, performance on pronoun interpretation was not associated with working memory, and the children made virtually no errors in their production of object pronouns. As the difficulties with pronoun interpretation were similar for children with ASD, children with ADHD and typically developing children, this suggests that certain types of perspective taking are unaffected in children with ASD and ADHD.
在包括英语和荷兰语在内的几种语言中，与反身代词（例如 ）相比，儿童对宾语代词（例如 ）的理解习得较晚。人们提出了各种句法和语用学解释来解释儿童在代词理解习得方面的这种延迟。本研究旨在通过调查这种延迟背后的潜在认知机制，来更深入地了解这种延迟。对6至12岁患有自闭症谱系障碍（ASD； = 47）、注意力缺陷多动障碍（ADHD； = 36）或发育正常（TD； = 38）的荷兰儿童进行了宾语代词和反身代词的理解与产出测试，以及心理理论、工作记忆和反应抑制测试。结果发现，所有三组儿童在代词理解方面都存在困难，并且他们在代词理解上的表现与心理理论和抑制能力有关。这些发现支持了一种从视角采择角度对宾语代词理解的解释，根据这种解释，听者需要考虑说话者的视角，以便阻止宾语代词与同一句子主语之间的共指关系。与其他理论解释所预测的不同，代词理解表现与工作记忆无关，并且儿童在宾语代词产出方面几乎没有犯错。由于ASD儿童、ADHD儿童和发育正常儿童在代词理解上的困难相似，这表明ASD儿童和ADHD儿童在某些类型的视角采择方面未受影响。
