Wolfer Pauline, Baumeister Franziska, Rudelli Nicola, Corrigan Grace, Naigles Letitia R, Durrleman Stephanie
Autism, Bilingualism, Cognitive and Communicative Development Lab (ABCCD), Faculty of Science and Medicine, University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland.
Department of Education and Learning/University of Teacher Education, Competence Centre for School, Social and Educational Needs (BESS), University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI), Locarno, Switzerland.
J Autism Dev Disord. 2024 Oct 7. doi: 10.1007/s10803-024-06569-y.
Metalinguistic awareness, the ability to manipulate and reflect upon language, remains largely unexplored in the autistic population. To address this gap, this observational cross-sectional study examines the metalinguistic abilities of school-aged autistic children in comparison to neurotypical peers in a novel tablet-based Grammatical Judgment Task (GJT) of reduced linguistic complexity engaging two kinds of metacognitive resources. Children had to judge non-verbally whether pre-recorded sentences were grammatically correct or not, following the traditional GJT paradigm assessing metamorphosyntactic skills. In addition, sentences with anomalous meaning that were either grammatically correct or grammatically incorrect were introduced to test metasemantic knowledge. Findings reveal no difference in performance between the groups, with participants performing on average above chance level both on the sentences assessing mere metamorphosyntactic skills and on the sentences placing an additional demand on metasemantics. This study shows that autistic individuals are able to mobilize metalinguistic resources when tested via a task of reduced linguistic complexity.
元语言意识，即操纵和反思语言的能力，在自闭症群体中在很大程度上仍未得到探索。为了填补这一空白，这项观察性横断面研究通过一项新颖的基于平板电脑的语法判断任务（GJT），比较了学龄期自闭症儿童与神经典型同龄人在元语言能力方面的差异，该任务语言复杂性降低，涉及两种元认知资源。儿童必须按照评估变形句法技能的传统GJT范式，通过非语言方式判断预先录制的句子在语法上是否正确。此外，还引入了语义异常的句子，这些句子要么语法正确，要么语法错误，以测试元语义知识。研究结果显示，两组在表现上没有差异，参与者在评估单纯变形句法技能的句子以及对元语义提出额外要求的句子上，平均表现均高于随机水平。这项研究表明，当通过语言复杂性降低的任务进行测试时，自闭症个体能够调动元语言资源。
