Happé F G
MRC Cognitive Development Unit, London, England.
Child Dev. 1995 Jun;66(3):843-55.
A number of studies have reported that most children with autism fail theory of mind tasks. It is unclear why certain children with autism pass such tests and what might be different about these subjects. In the present study, the role of age and verbal ability in theory of mind task performance was explored. Data were pooled from 70 autistic, 34 mentally handicapped, and 70 normal young subjects, previously tested for a number of different studies. The analysis suggested that children with autism required far higher verbal mental age to pass false belief tasks than did other subjects. While normally developing children had a 50% probability of passing both tasks at the verbal mental age of 4 years, autistic subjects took more than twice as long to reach this probability of success (at the advanced verbal mental age of 9-2). Possible causal relations between verbal ability and the ability to represent mental states are discussed.
多项研究报告称，大多数自闭症儿童在心理理论任务测试中表现不佳。目前尚不清楚为何某些自闭症儿童能通过此类测试，以及这些儿童可能存在哪些不同之处。在本研究中，我们探讨了年龄和语言能力在心理理论任务表现中的作用。数据来自70名自闭症、34名智力障碍和70名正常的年轻受试者，这些受试者之前参与了多项不同的研究。分析表明，自闭症儿童要通过错误信念任务，所需的语言心理年龄远高于其他受试者。正常发育的儿童在4岁语言心理年龄时通过两项任务的概率为50%，而自闭症受试者达到这一成功概率所需的时间是正常儿童的两倍多（在9 - 2岁的高级语言心理年龄时）。本文还讨论了语言能力与心理状态表征能力之间可能的因果关系。
