Eigsti Inge-Marie, Pouw Wim
Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Connecticut; 406 Babbidge Road; Storrs, CT 06269; USA.
Donders Center for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, Heyendaalseweg 135, 6525 AJ Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Lang Cogn. 2024 Dec;16(4):1812-1833. doi: 10.1017/langcog.2024.33. Epub 2024 Sep 24.
The production of speech and gesture is exquisitely temporally coordinated. In autistic individuals, speech-gesture synchrony during spontaneous discourse is disrupted. To evaluate whether this asynchrony reflects motor coordination versus language production processes, the current study examined performed hand movements during speech in youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) compared to neurotypical youth. Neurotypical adult performance provided a mature baseline. Participants read aloud rhythmic nursery rhymes, while producing a beat-like hand movement. An automated pixel-change video measure identified kinematic peaks; using smoothed acoustic envelope analyses, we identified peaks in speech. Results indicated few diagnostic group differences in explicit speech-movement coordination, although adolescent performance differed from adults. Adults demonstrated higher tempo and greater rhythmicity in their coordination; this group difference suggests that the method is sufficiently subtle to reveal individual differences and that this form of complex coordination undergoes ongoing maturation beyond adolescence. The sample is small, and thus results are necessarily preliminary. In the context of prior speech-gesture coordination studies, these findings of intact synchrony are consistent with the hypothesis that it is the demands of discourse planning, rather than motor coordination, that have led to prior findings of asynchony during spontaneous speech; this possibility awaits future research.
言语和手势的产生在时间上有着精确的协调。在自闭症个体中,自发话语过程中的言语 - 手势同步性受到破坏。为了评估这种不同步是反映了运动协调还是语言产生过程,本研究将患有自闭症谱系障碍(ASD)的青少年与神经典型青少年在言语过程中手部的运动表现进行了对比。神经典型成年人的表现提供了一个成熟的基线。参与者大声朗读有节奏的童谣,同时做出类似节拍的手部动作。一种自动像素变化视频测量方法确定了运动学峰值;通过平滑声学包络分析,我们确定了言语中的峰值。结果表明,尽管青少年的表现与成年人不同,但在明确的言语 - 动作协调方面,诊断组之间差异不大。成年人在协调方面表现出更高的节奏和更强的韵律性;这种组间差异表明该方法足够精细,能够揭示个体差异,并且这种复杂协调形式在青春期后仍在持续成熟。样本量较小,因此结果必然是初步的。在先前的言语 - 手势协调研究背景下,这些同步性完好的发现与以下假设一致:即导致先前在自发言语中发现不同步的原因是话语规划的要求,而非运动协调;这种可能性有待未来研究。