Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, University of Delaware, 125 E Main St., Newark, DE, 19716, USA.
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA.
J Autism Dev Disord. 2024 May;54(5):1912-1927. doi: 10.1007/s10803-023-05902-1. Epub 2023 Feb 7.
Statistical learning (SL), the ability to detect and extract regularities from inputs, is considered a domain-general building block for typical language development. We compared 55 verbal children with autism (ASD, 6-12 years) and 50 typically-developing children in four SL tasks. The ASD group exhibited reduced learning in the linguistic SL tasks (syllable and letter), but showed intact learning for the nonlinguistic SL tasks (tone and image). In the ASD group, better linguistic SL was associated with higher language skills measured by parental report and sentence recall. Therefore, the atypicality of SL in autism is not domain-general but tied to specific processing constraints related to verbal stimuli. Our findings provide a novel perspective for understanding language heterogeneity in autism.
统计学习（SL）是一种从输入中检测和提取规律的能力，被认为是典型语言发展的一种通用构建模块。我们比较了 55 名患有自闭症（ASD，6-12 岁）的言语儿童和 50 名典型发育儿童在四项 SL 任务中的表现。ASD 组在语言 SL 任务（音节和字母）中表现出学习能力下降，但在非语言 SL 任务（音调和图像）中表现出学习能力正常。在 ASD 组中，更好的语言 SL 与父母报告和句子回忆测量的更高语言技能相关。因此，自闭症中 SL 的异常不是通用的，而是与与言语刺激相关的特定处理限制有关。我们的发现为理解自闭症中的语言异质性提供了一个新的视角。
