School of Education, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK.
School of Psychology and Vision Sciences, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK.
Autism Res. 2023 Sep;16(9):1775-1785. doi: 10.1002/aur.2994. Epub 2023 Jul 27.
Research has shown that information processing differences associated with autism could impact on language and literacy development. This study tested an approach to autistic cognition that suggests learning occurs via prediction errors, and autistic people have very precise and inflexible predictions that result in more sensitivity to meaningless signal errors than non-autistic readers. We used this theoretical background to investigate whether differences in prediction coding influence how orthographic (Experiment 1) and semantic information (Experiment 2) is processed by autistic readers. Experiment 1 used a lexical decision task to test whether letter position information was processed less flexibly by autistic than non-autistic readers. Three types of letter strings: words, transposed letter and substituted letters nonwords were presented. Experiment 2 used a semantic relatedness task to test whether autistic readers processed words with high and low semantic diversity differently to non-autistic readers. Results showed similar transposed letter and semantic diversity effects for all readers; indicating that orthographic and semantic information are processed similarly by autistic and non-autistic readers; and therefore, differences in prediction coding were not evident for these lexical processing tasks.
研究表明，自闭症相关的信息处理差异可能会影响语言和读写能力的发展。本研究测试了一种自闭症认知方法，该方法表明学习是通过预测误差发生的，而自闭症患者的预测非常准确和僵化，这导致他们对无意义的信号错误比非自闭症读者更敏感。我们利用这一理论背景，研究了预测编码的差异是否会影响自闭症读者处理拼写法（实验 1）和语义信息（实验 2）的方式。实验 1 使用词汇判断任务来测试自闭症患者是否比非自闭症患者更不灵活地处理字母位置信息。呈现了三种类型的字母串：单词、字母换位和字母替换非单词。实验 2 使用语义相关性任务来测试自闭症读者是否与非自闭症读者不同地处理高语义多样性和低语义多样性的单词。结果表明，所有读者的字母换位和语义多样性效应相似；这表明自闭症和非自闭症读者以相似的方式处理拼写法和语义信息；因此，在这些词汇处理任务中，预测编码的差异并不明显。
