Social language in autism spectrum disorder: A computational analysis of sentiment and linguistic abstraction
Social language in autism spectrum disorder: A computational analysis of sentiment and linguistic abstraction
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DOI：
10.1371/journal.pone.0229985
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发表时间：
2020-03-06
期刊：
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
Wawer, Aleksander
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Chojnicka, Izabela;Wawer, Aleksander
患有自闭症谱系障碍 (ASD) 的人表现出实用（社交）语言障碍，包括叙事技巧和对话能力。我们的目的是使用自然语言处理技术定量描述自闭症谱系障碍的叙事表现：基于语言类别模型的情感和语言抽象分析。具有与年龄、性别、种族、言语和非言语智商相匹配的典型发育的自闭症谱系障碍患者在自闭症诊断观察表第二版评估中的两项标准化任务中产生了语言样本：讲述书中的故事和图片的描述。自闭症谱系障碍组和对照组之间只有在读书任务期间产生的叙述在情感极性和语言抽象方面有所不同。与患有自闭症谱系障碍的人相比，具有典型发展的参与者更经常使用带有积极情绪的词语。对于具有负面情绪的单词，差异略有显着（具有典型发展的参与者更频繁地使用具有负面情绪的单词）。与具有典型发展的同龄人的叙述相比，患有自闭症谱系障碍的人的书籍任务叙述的另一个特点是语言抽象水平较低。语言抽象与大量具有情感极性的单词呈强烈正相关。语言抽象和情感极性均与参与者的年龄或言语和非言语智商无关。这些结果支持了情感和语言抽象分析作为对自闭症谱系障碍患者的叙事能力进行定量、全自动评估的有用工具的承诺。
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate impairments with pragmatic (social) language, including narrative skills and conversational abilities. We aimed to quantitatively characterize narrative performance in ASD using natural language processing techniques: sentiment and language abstraction analyses based on the Linguistic Category Model. Individuals with ASD and with typical development matched for age, gender, ethnicity, and verbal and nonverbal intelligence quotients produced language samples during two standardized tasks from the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, Second Edition assessment: Telling a Story from a Book and Description of a Picture. Only the narratives produced during the Book Task differed between ASD and control groups in terms of emotional polarity and language abstraction. Participants with typical development used words with positive sentiment more often in comparison to individuals with ASD. In the case of words with negative sentiment, the differences were marginally significant (participants with typical development used words with negative sentiment more often). The Book Task narratives of individuals with ASD were also characterized by a lower level of language abstraction than narratives of peers with typical development. Linguistic abstraction was strongly positively correlated with a higher number of words with emotional polarity. Neither linguistic abstraction nor emotional polarity correlated with participants' age or verbal and nonverbal IQ. The results support the promise of sentiment and language abstraction analyses as a useful tool for the quantitative, fully automated assessment of narrative abilities among individuals with ASD.