Language Processing and Word Learning in Preschoolers with Autism Spectrum Disorder

项目总结/摘要 自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）儿童的语言能力经常受损。语言能力在 学龄前年龄是一个强有力的预测结果。在早期，父母是早期语言的主要来源。 因此，研究自闭症儿童父母提供的语言输入和儿童的语言能力至关重要。 理解并从中学习。在目前的提案中，我们研究了患有自闭症的学龄前儿童，通常- 发展中（TD）同龄人分配意义的语言，他们听到的，以及父母的语言输入如何支持这些努力。 更具体地说，我们的目标是了解儿童如何学习新单词的含义。我们关注动词 因为听到不熟悉动词的句子语境为TD儿童提供了有用的信息， 他们的意义然而，我们对什么样的句子语境在ASD中最有用，或者什么样的句子语境在ASD中最有用知之甚少， 父母在自己的语言中提供的各种语境。为了解决这个问题，我们向孩子们展示了一些不熟悉的单词， 无论是在精心构建的语言环境，不同的信息和易于处理，以及 每个上下文的重复次数（研究1）或由他们自己的父母产生的无脚本句子上下文（研究2）。 我们使用眼动追踪测量来评估儿童如何理解上下文并赋予单词含义。 这项研究将阐明ASD和TD语言学习的机制，并将支持 制定有效的语言干预措施，包括基于父母的干预措施。

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Language ability is often impaired in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Language ability in the preschool years is a powerful predictor of outcomes. In these early years, parents are a primary source of early language. It is therefore crucial to study the language input that parents of children with ASD provide and children's abilities to comprehend and learn from that input. In the current proposal, we study how preschoolers with ASD and typically- developing (TD) peers assign meaning to the language they hear, and how parental language input supports these efforts. More specifically, our goal is to understand how children learn the meanings of new words. We focus on verbs because the sentence contexts in which unfamiliar verbs are heard provide helpful information for TD children to acquire their meaning. However, we know little about what kinds of sentence contexts are most useful in ASD, or about what kinds of contexts parents provide in their own speech. To pursue this issue, we present children with unfamiliar words either in carefully constructed linguistic contexts, varying how informative and easy-to-process they are, as well as the number of repetitions of each context (Study 1) or unscripted sentence contexts produced by their own parent (Study 2). We use eye-tracking measures to assess how children understand the contexts and assign the words a meaning. This research will shed light on the mechanisms underlying language learning in ASD and in TD and will support the development of effective language interventions, including parent-based interventions.