School of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Center for Autism and Developmental Disorders, San Diego State University, CA.
Child Language Doctoral Program, The University of Kansas, Lawrence.
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2024 Jul 9;67(7):2297-2315. doi: 10.1044/2024_JSLHR-24-00028. Epub 2024 May 20.
Despite the clinical utility of sentence production and sentence repetition to identify language impairment in autism, little is known about the extent to which these tasks are sensitive to potential language variation. One promising method is strategic scoring, which has good clinical utility for identifying language impairment in nonautistic school-age children across variants of English. This report applies strategic scoring to analyze sentence repetition and sentence production in autistic adolescents and adults.
Thirty-one diverse autistic adolescents and adults with language impairment (ALI; = 15) and without language impairment (ASD; = 16) completed the Formulated Sentences and Recalling Sentences subtests of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-Fifth Edition. Descriptive analyses and regression evaluated effects of scoring condition, group, and scoring condition by group on outcomes, as well as group differences in finiteness marking across utterances and morphosyntactic structures.
Strategic and unmodified item-level scores were essentially constant on both subtests and significantly lower in the ALI than the ASD group. Only group predicted item-level scores. Group differences were limited to: percent grammatical utterances on Formulated Sentences and percent production of overt structures combined on Sentence Repetition (ALI < ASD).
Findings support the feasibility of strategic scoring for sentence production and sentence repetition to identify language impairment and indicate that potential language variation in finiteness marking did not confound outcomes in this sample. To better understand the clinical utility of strategic scoring, replication with a larger sample varying in age and comparisons with dialect-sensitive measures are needed.
尽管句子产生和句子重复在识别自闭症中的语言障碍方面具有临床实用性，但对于这些任务在多大程度上对潜在的语言变化敏感知之甚少。一种很有前途的方法是策略评分，它对于识别非自闭症学龄儿童在各种英语变体中的语言障碍具有很好的临床实用性。本报告将策略评分应用于分析自闭症青少年和成年人的句子重复和句子产生。
31 名语言障碍（ALI；n=15）和无语言障碍（ASD；n=16）的不同自闭症青少年和成年人完成了临床评估语言基础第五版的构式句子和回忆句子子测试。描述性分析和回归评估了评分条件、组和评分条件与组对结果的影响，以及组在话语和形态句法结构中的限定标记的差异。
两种子测试的策略和未修改的项目水平分数基本保持不变，且在 ALI 组中明显低于 ASD 组。只有组预测了项目水平分数。组差异仅限于构式句子的语法句子百分比和句子重复中显性结构的生成百分比（ALI<ASD）。
研究结果支持使用策略评分来识别语言障碍的句子产生和句子重复的可行性，并表明在该样本中，有限标记的潜在语言变化并没有混淆结果。为了更好地理解策略评分的临床实用性，需要使用更大的样本进行复制，并与对方言敏感的措施进行比较。
