Artis Jonet, Luyster Rhiannon J, Carroll Lily, He Angela Xiaoxue, Arunachalam Sudha
Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders, New York University, 665 Broadway, New York, New York 10012.
Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, 0100 Samuel J. LeFrak Hall, 7251 Preinkert Dr., College Park, MD 20742.
J Cogn Dev. 2025;26(4):515-538. doi: 10.1080/15248372.2025.2470236. Epub 2025 Mar 5.
This research paper explores the role of speaker, listener and real-time social attention for pronoun comprehension in autistic and nonautistic children in northeast United States. We assessed the pronoun comprehension of 22 autistic children (average age of 62 months, range 46-80 months) and 22 nonautistic children (average age 44 months, range 30-57 months) matched on expressive vocabulary scores. We evaluated first- and second-person possessive pronoun comprehension ("my" and "your") using a game in which two experimenters hid stickers and provided clues to their location by providing a verbal clue (e.g., "It's in your box") with accompanying gaze to the addressee. We also coded each child's gaze to the speaker during the pronoun comprehension task. Findings suggest that both autistic and nonautistic children comprehend first- and second-person pronouns at levels above chance. Nonautistic children performed better at comprehending second-person pronouns than autistic children. For both groups, children were more accurate in their comprehension of the second-person pronoun "your" when it referred to themselves versus when it referred to the experimenter; errors more commonly reflected "self-bias" rather than pronoun reversal errors. Children who gazed at the speaker performed better in comprehending second-person pronouns than children who did not. Our results reveal considerable overlap in the strengths and challenges of young language learners with and without autism. Our findings suggest that children may benefit from repeated experiences across varied conversational settings-including addressed and non-addressed speech-to practice the synchronization of semantics and pragmatics in their ongoing mastery of language.
本研究论文探讨了说话者、倾听者以及实时社会注意力在美国东北部自闭症和非自闭症儿童代词理解中的作用。我们评估了22名自闭症儿童（平均年龄62个月，范围46 - 80个月）和22名非自闭症儿童（平均年龄44个月，范围30 - 57个月）的代词理解能力，这些儿童在表达性词汇得分上相匹配。我们通过一个游戏评估第一和第二人称所有格代词（“我的”和“你的”）的理解，在这个游戏中，两名实验者藏起贴纸，并通过提供口头线索（例如，“它在你的盒子里”）并伴随看向收件人的目光来提示贴纸的位置。我们还在代词理解任务中对每个孩子看向说话者的目光进行了编码。研究结果表明，自闭症和非自闭症儿童对第一和第二人称代词的理解水平均高于随机水平。非自闭症儿童在理解第二人称代词方面比自闭症儿童表现更好。对于两组儿童，当第二人称代词“你的”指代他们自己时，他们对其的理解比指代实验者时更准确；错误更常见地反映为“自我偏向”而非代词反转错误。看向说话者的儿童在理解第二人称代词方面比不看向说话者的儿童表现更好。我们的结果揭示了有自闭症和无自闭症的年轻语言学习者在优势和挑战方面存在相当大的重叠。我们的研究结果表明，儿童可能会从各种对话情境中的重复体验中受益，包括有针对性的和无针对性的言语，以在他们持续掌握语言的过程中练习语义和语用的同步。
