Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands; Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands; Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.
University of Pennsylvania, Department of Linguistics, Philadelphia, PA, USA; University of Pennsylvania, Department of Biology, Philadelphia, PA, USA; University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Fryske Akademy, Leeuwarden, the Netherlands.
Cognition. 2023 Oct;239:105571. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105571. Epub 2023 Jul 27.
Prediction appears to be an important characteristic of the human mind. It has also been suggested that prediction is a core difference of autistic children. Past research exploring language-mediated anticipatory eye movements in autistic children, however, has been somewhat contradictory, with some studies finding normal anticipatory processing in autistic children with low levels of autistic traits but others observing weaker prediction effects in autistic children with less receptive language skills. Here we investigated language-mediated anticipatory eye movements in young children who differed in the severity of their level of autistic traits and were in professional institutional care in Hangzhou, China. We chose the same spoken sentences (translated into Mandarin Chinese) and visual stimuli as a previous study which observed robust prediction effects in young children (Mani & Huettig, 2012) and included a control group of typically-developing children. Typically developing but not autistic children showed robust prediction effects. Most interestingly, autistic children with lower communication, motor, and (adaptive) behavior scores exhibited both less predictive and non-predictive visual attention behavior. Our results raise the possibility that differences in language-mediated anticipatory eye movements in autistic children with higher levels of autistic traits may be differences in visual attention in disguise, a hypothesis that needs further investigation.
预测似乎是人类思维的一个重要特征。也有人认为，预测是自闭症儿童的核心差异之一。然而，过去探索自闭症儿童语言介导的预期眼动的研究有些矛盾，一些研究发现自闭症特质水平较低的自闭症儿童具有正常的预期加工能力，但其他研究则观察到自闭症儿童的预测效果较弱，语言接受能力较差。在这里，我们研究了在中国杭州的专业机构护理中，自闭症特质严重程度不同的幼儿的语言介导的预期眼动。我们选择了与之前一项研究相同的口语句子（翻译成中文普通话）和视觉刺激，该研究观察到幼儿（Mani & Huettig，2012）中存在强大的预测效果，并包括一个典型发育儿童的对照组。典型发育的儿童而非自闭症儿童表现出强大的预测效果。最有趣的是，沟通、运动和（适应性）行为得分较低的自闭症儿童表现出较少的预测性和非预测性视觉注意力行为。我们的结果提出了一种可能性，即自闭症儿童的语言介导的预期眼动差异可能是高自闭症特质儿童的视觉注意力差异的一种伪装，这一假设需要进一步研究。
