Liu Min, Luo Yuran, Bai Xiaopeng, Wang Yanxia, Hu Xinyu, Sun Mudi, Qu Lu, Han Xuling, Zhao Hang, Lu Haidan, Liu Qiaoyun
Shanghai Institute of AI for Education, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China.
Innovation Lab of Education and Rehabilitation, Faculty of Education, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China.
J Autism Dev Disord. 2025 May 14. doi: 10.1007/s10803-025-06875-z.
Research investigating the characteristics of expressive vocabulary in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is limited, particularly in cross-linguistic contexts. This study aimed to systematically identify the characteristics of expressive vocabulary in 3- to 6-year-old Mandarin-speaking children with ASD.
We analyzed 10-min spontaneous language samples from parent-child free play sessions involving 21 children with ASD, 18 developmentally matched children with developmental delay (DD), and 15 chronologically age-matched typically developing (TD) children. The analysis was based on the grammatical characteristics of Mandarin.
All three groups demonstrated a preference for verbs. Children in the ASD group showed a significantly lower number of tokens and types than those in the TD group in 11 content word categories and five function word categories. The ASD group exhibited greater similarities with the DD group in most vocabulary categories regarding the number of tokens, types, and type-to-token ratio (TTR) but still displayed subtle differences. Notably, the ASD group had a significantly higher total TTR than the TD and DD groups. The number of types of common nouns, number of tokens of pronouns were significantly lower in the ASD group than in the DD group.
These preliminary findings suggest that the language development of TD children is reflected in standardized tests and vocabulary expression in spontaneous language samples compared to children with ASD. Additionally, the qualitative differences in expressive vocabulary between the DD and ASD groups indicate that children with ASD may exhibit atypical vocabulary learning mechanisms.
关于自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）儿童表达性词汇特征的研究有限，尤其是在跨语言背景下。本研究旨在系统地识别3至6岁说普通话的ASD儿童表达性词汇的特征。
我们分析了来自亲子自由玩耍环节的10分钟自发语言样本，这些样本涉及21名ASD儿童、18名发育匹配的发育迟缓（DD）儿童和15名年龄匹配的发育正常（TD）儿童。分析基于普通话的语法特征。
所有三组儿童都表现出对动词的偏好。ASD组儿童在11个实词类别和5个虚词类别中的词元数量和类型数量均显著低于TD组。在大多数词汇类别中，ASD组在词元数量、类型数量和类型-词元比（TTR）方面与DD组表现出更大的相似性，但仍存在细微差异。值得注意的是，ASD组的总TTR显著高于TD组和DD组。ASD组的普通名词类型数量和代词词元数量显著低于DD组。
这些初步研究结果表明，与ASD儿童相比，TD儿童的语言发展体现在标准化测试和自发语言样本中的词汇表达上。此外，DD组和ASD组在表达性词汇方面的质性差异表明，ASD儿童可能表现出非典型的词汇学习机制。
