Beradze Marianna, Meir Natalia
The Department of English Literature and Linguistics, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, 5290002, Israel.
The Department of English Literature and Linguistics and the Gonda Brain Research Center, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, 5290002, Israel.
J Autism Dev Disord. 2024 Sep 19. doi: 10.1007/s10803-024-06533-w.
There is little research on the production of speech disfluencies such as silent pauses, repetitions, self-corrections, and filled pauses (e.g., eh, em) in monolingual autistic children, and there is no data on this crucial part of speech production in bilingual autistic children. This study aims to address this gap by examining disfluency production in bilingual autistic and non-autistic children across two linguistically distinct languages, HL-Russian (the home language) and SL-Hebrew (the societal language). Fifty-one bilingual Russian-Hebrew-speaking autistic and non-autistic children aged 5-9 (autistic: n = 21; non-autistic: n = 30), matched for age and non-verbal intelligence, participated in picture-based story-generation tasks (LITMUS MAIN, Gagarina et al., ZAS Papers in Linguistics, 63:1-36, 2019). Audio recordings of narrative samples were transcribed, coded, and scored for eleven disfluency types using CLAN tools. The non-autistic group produced higher overall disfluency rate than the autistic group. The autistic group exhibited fewer filled and silent pauses than the non-autistic group in HL-Russian. Furthermore, non-autistic children manifested varied distribution of disfluency types across languages, while autistic children displayed more consistent patterns across languages. In summary, we replicated findings from previous research on monolinguals only partly, as no between-group difference in filled pauses was found in SL-Hebrew. Additionally, bilingual autistic children exhibited language-universal patterns of disfluency production, whereas their non-autistic peers displayed language-specific patterns.
关于单语自闭症儿童言语不流畅现象（如沉默停顿、重复、自我纠正和填充停顿，例如“嗯”“呃”）产生情况的研究很少，而且对于双语自闭症儿童言语产生这一关键部分没有相关数据。本研究旨在通过考察5 - 9岁双语自闭症和非自闭症儿童在两种语言上的不流畅现象来填补这一空白，这两种语言分别是HL - 俄语（母语）和SL - 希伯来语（社会语言）。51名讲俄语 - 希伯来语的5至9岁双语自闭症和非自闭症儿童（自闭症组：n = 21；非自闭症组：n = 30）参与了基于图片的故事生成任务（LITMUS MAIN，加加林娜等人，《ZAS语言学论文集》，63:1 - 36，2019），这些儿童在年龄和非言语智力方面相匹配。使用CLAN工具对叙事样本的录音进行转录、编码，并对11种不流畅类型进行评分。非自闭症组的总体不流畅率高于自闭症组。在HL - 俄语中，自闭症组的填充停顿和沉默停顿比非自闭症组少。此外，非自闭症儿童在不同语言中不流畅类型的分布各不相同，而自闭症儿童在不同语言中表现出更一致的模式。总之，我们仅部分重复了之前关于单语者的研究结果，因为在SL - 希伯来语中未发现填充停顿的组间差异。此外，双语自闭症儿童表现出语言通用的不流畅产生模式，而他们的非自闭症同伴则表现出语言特定的模式。
