Baron-Cohen S, Baldwin D A, Crowson M
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Child Dev. 1997 Feb;68(1):48-57.
Normal toddlers infer the referent of a novel word by consulting the speaker's direction of gaze. That is, they use the Speaker's Direction of Gaze (SDG) strategy. This is a far more powerful strategy than the alternative, the Listener's Direction of Gaze (LDG) strategy. In Study 1 we tested if children with autism, who have well-documented impairments in joint attention, used the SDG or the LDG strategy to learn a novel word for a novel object. Results showed that although 70.6% of children with mental handicap passed the test by making the correct mapping between a novel word and a novel object, via the SDG strategy, only 29.4% of children with autism did so. Instead, their reliance on the LDG strategy led to mapping errors. In Study 2 a group of normal children, whose chronological age (24 months old) was equated with the verbal mental age of the 2 clinical groups in Study 1, was tested using a similar procedure. Results showed that 79% of this normal group passed the test by making the correct mapping between a novel word and a novel object using the SDG strategy. Taken together, the results from both studies suggest that children with autism are relatively insensitive to a speaker's gaze direction as an index of the speaker's intention to refer. This result is consistent with previous findings showing that children with autism are relatively "blind" to the mentalistic significance of the eyes. Discussion centers on how the absence of an SDG strategy might disrupt specific aspects of language development in autism.
正常幼儿通过参考说话者的注视方向来推断新单词的指代对象。也就是说，他们使用说话者注视方向（SDG）策略。这是一种比另一种策略——听者注视方向（LDG）策略——强大得多的策略。在研究1中，我们测试了患有自闭症的儿童，他们在共同注意方面有充分记录的缺陷，是否使用SDG或LDG策略来学习新物体的新单词。结果显示，虽然70.6%的智力障碍儿童通过SDG策略在新单词和新物体之间建立正确映射而通过了测试，但只有29.4%的自闭症儿童做到了这一点。相反，他们对LDG策略的依赖导致了映射错误。在研究2中，一组实际年龄（24个月）与研究1中两个临床组的语言心理年龄相当的正常儿童，使用类似的程序进行了测试。结果显示，这个正常组中有79%的儿童通过使用SDG策略在新单词和新物体之间建立正确映射而通过了测试。综合来看，两项研究的结果表明，自闭症儿童对说话者的注视方向作为说话者指代意图的指标相对不敏感。这一结果与之前的研究结果一致，即自闭症儿童对眼睛的心理意义相对“视而不见”。讨论集中在缺乏SDG策略可能如何扰乱自闭症患者语言发展的特定方面。
