Mues Marjolein, Demurie Ellen, Erdogan Maide, Schaubroeck Sarah, Krol Manon, Goodwin Amy, Buitelaar Jan, Loth Eva, Roeyers Herbert
Brain Development Lab, Department of Psychology and Human Development, Vanderbilt University, USA.
Research in Developmental Disorders Lab, Department of Experimental-Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University, Belgium.
J Child Lang. 2025 Sep;52(5):1063-1079. doi: 10.1017/S0305000924000321. Epub 2024 Sep 25.
English-speaking autistic children use the hesitation marker less often than non-autistic children but use at a similar rate. It is unclear why this is the case. We employed a sample of Dutch-speaking children from the Preschool Brain Imaging and Behavior Project to examine hesitation markers in autistic and non-autistic preschoolers with the aim to 1) make a crosslinguistic comparison of hesitation marker usage and 2) examine hypotheses regarding the underlying linguistic mechanisms of hesitation markers: the symptom hypothesis and the signal hypothesis. We found initial group differences in all hesitation markers but these results were rendered insignificant after controlling for age, sex and nonverbal cognition. We found significant correlations between hesitation marker usage and expressive and receptive language, but not autism traits. Lastly, we show interesting cross-linguistic differences in hesitation marker usage between Dutch-speaking participants and previously described English-speaking participants, such as a preference for over .
说英语的自闭症儿童使用犹豫标记的频率低于非自闭症儿童，但使用 的频率相似。目前尚不清楚为何会出现这种情况。我们采用了来自学前脑成像与行为项目的荷兰语儿童样本，以研究自闭症和非自闭症学龄前儿童中的犹豫标记，目的是：1）对犹豫标记的使用进行跨语言比较；2）检验关于犹豫标记潜在语言机制的假设：症状假设和信号假设。我们发现所有犹豫标记在初始时存在组间差异，但在控制了年龄、性别和非语言认知后，这些结果变得不显著。我们发现犹豫标记的使用与表达性和接受性语言之间存在显著相关性，但与自闭症特征无关。最后，我们展示了荷兰语参与者与先前描述的英语参与者在犹豫标记使用上有趣的跨语言差异，例如比起 更倾向于使用 。
