Accessing and selecting word meaning in autism spectrum disorder
Accessing and selecting word meaning in autism spectrum disorder
复制标题
DOI：
10.1111/j.1469-7610.2011.02393.x
复制
发表时间：
2011-09-01
影响因子：
7.6
通讯作者：
Snowling, M. J.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Henderson, L. M.;Clarke, P. J.;Snowling, M. J.
背景：自闭症谱系障碍 (ASD) 中普遍存在理解困难，但人们对这些困难的原因知之甚少。本研究调查患有自闭症谱系障碍的儿童如何获取和选择歧义词的含义，以测试有关其理解困难性质的四种假设：语义缺陷、中心连贯性弱、自上而下控制减少和抑制缺陷。方法：使用跨模态语义启动范式。孩子们单独听到同音素数，或者作为句子中的最后一个词，偏向于从属意义，然后命名描绘同音异义词的主导或从属关联的图片目标。结果：当同音异义词被单独呈现时，患有自闭症谱系障碍的儿童和对照儿童在 250 毫秒 ISI 时表现出对主导和从属图片的启动。在 1,000 毫秒 ISI 时，对照组显示出显性（但不是次要）启动，而 ASD 组则没有显示任何启动。当同音异义词出现在从属句子上下文中时，两组仅在 250 毫秒 ISI 时表现出对上下文适当（从属）含义的启动，这表明上下文对含义选择具有早期影响。在 1,000 毫秒 ISI 时，对照组显示出适合情境（但不是不适当）的启动，而 ASD 组则显示出适当和不适当的启动。结论：患有自闭症谱系障碍的儿童在处理过程的早期表现出对语义信息的完整访问；然而，他们在处理后期的语义表示选择方面表现出了缺陷。这些发现表明，启动自上而下的策略来调节在线语义处理的困难可能会损害自闭症谱系障碍的语言理解。讨论了干预的影响。
Background: Comprehension difficulties are commonly reported in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) but the causes of these difficulties are poorly understood. This study investigates how children with ASD access and select meanings of ambiguous words to test four hypotheses regarding the nature of their comprehension difficulties: semantic deficit, weak central coherence, reduced top-down control and inhibition deficit. Methods: The cross-modal semantic priming paradigm was used. Children heard homonym primes in isolation or as final words in sentences biased towards the subordinate meaning and then named picture targets depicting dominant or subordinate associates of homonyms. Results: When homonyms were presented in isolation, children with ASD and controls showed priming for dominant and subordinate pictures at 250ms ISI. At 1,000ms ISI, the controls showed dominant (but not subordinate) priming whilst the ASD group did not show any priming. When homonyms were presented in subordinate sentence contexts, both groups only showed priming for context-appropriate (subordinate) meanings at 250ms ISI, suggesting that context has an early influence on meaning selection. At 1,000ms ISI the controls showed context-appropriate (but not inappropriate) priming whereas the ASD group showed both appropriate and inappropriate priming. Conclusions: Children with ASD showed intact access to semantic information early in the time course of processing; however, they showed impairments in the selection of semantic representations later in processing. These findings suggest that a difficulty with initiating top-down strategies to modulate online semantic processing may compromise language comprehension in ASD. Implications for intervention are discussed.