Arnold G, Schwartz S
J Autism Dev Disord. 1983 Jun;13(2):129-39. doi: 10.1007/BF01531814.
The profound language deficit in early infantile autism has led to speculation about the similarities between autistic and language-impaired children. Since aphasia in adults and many children is typically the result of left cerebral hemisphere damage, some researchers have suggested that autistic children also suffer from left hemisphere damage. So far, only indirect or unreliable evidence has been offered in support of this hypothesis. In the present experiment, autistic, language-impaired, and non-language-impaired children were compared on a dichotic listening task designed to overcome some of the deficiencies of earlier research. Language-impaired children were found to exhibit a left ear bias for language material (indicating right hemisphere lateralization for language), whereas the autistic and non-language-impaired children showed the opposite, right ear bias. As the autistic children showed a pattern similar to that of normal children, the present experiment found no evidence for either left hemisphere damage or aphasiclike performance among autistic children. The implications of these findings for understanding the autistic language deficit are explored.
婴幼儿期自闭症中严重的语言缺陷引发了人们对自闭症儿童与语言障碍儿童之间相似性的猜测。由于成人和许多儿童的失语症通常是左脑半球损伤的结果，一些研究人员认为自闭症儿童也患有左半球损伤。到目前为止，仅提供了间接或不可靠的证据来支持这一假设。在本实验中，对自闭症儿童、语言障碍儿童和非语言障碍儿童进行了一项双耳分听任务的比较，该任务旨在克服早期研究的一些缺陷。研究发现，语言障碍儿童在语言材料上表现出左耳偏好（表明语言功能在右半球侧化），而自闭症儿童和非语言障碍儿童则表现出相反的右耳偏好。由于自闭症儿童表现出与正常儿童相似的模式，本实验未发现自闭症儿童存在左半球损伤或类失语症表现的证据。本文探讨了这些发现对理解自闭症语言缺陷的意义。
