Verbal/non-verbal asynchrony in adolescents with high-functioning Autism

描述(申请人提供)：患有高功能自闭症(HFA)的青少年在非语言社交方面存在严重缺陷，这往往会导致抑郁和社交退缩。这些缺陷在其加工和生产能力方面尤为明显 在品质上适当的面部表情。有人认为，言语行为和非言语行为之间缺乏同步性可能是造成这种社交尴尬的重要原因。然而，很少有人关注接受性和表现性非语言交际之间的相互作用，以及它们与有声语言的结合。在接受领域，来自眼球追踪研究的证据越来越多地表明，患有HFA的参与者在他们对交流面部表情的扫描路径上存在细微的、质的差异。在这一群体中，人们对非语言交际的产生仍然知之甚少，但初步证据表明，与典型的发展中(TD)同龄人相比，表达绝对准确，但定性上笨拙，与语言不那么同步。在一种高度创新的方法中，拟议的项目将量化患有HFA的青少年面部表情处理和产生的质量差异。我们将使用眼动和动作捕捉方法来记录面部表情产生和处理的客观测量，并将它们与TD同行记录的笨拙的主观外观联系起来。我们将明确的目标是确定HFA青少年潜在的语言/非语言同步缺陷对这种社交尴尬的贡献。眼球追踪和动作捕捉数据将与每个参与者的行为测量和诊断严重程度相关联。动作捕捉数据还将与天真的TD观察者对笨拙的判断相关联，并将分析表达和接受社交技能的定性成分及其与口头语言的同步性。这项工作的重要性在于建立具体的、可量化的非语言交际特征与每个HFA参与者的社交成功之间的关系，这一关系通过症状严重程度和TD编码员的定性感知来衡量。我们假设患有HFA的青少年在接受和表达方式上的语言/非语言同步性降低，并且ASD症状严重程度较高的个体在接受和表达任务中表现出更高的异步性。除了记录细粒缺陷外，我们还将确定患有HFA的个体是否能够改善他们对时空线索的反应。我们提议的项目的这一组成部分将通过创建更明确定义的干预目标，例如语言/非语言同步，最终导致改善社交沟通干预。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Adolescents with high-functioning autism (HFA) have significant deficits in non-verbal social communication, which often lead to depression and social withdrawal. These deficits are particularly apparent in their ability to process and produce qualitatively appropriate facial expressions. It has been suggested that a lack of synchrony between verbal and non-verbal speech acts may significantly contribute to this social awkwardness. And yet, very little attention has been paid to the interaction between receptive and expressive non-verbal communication and their integration with verbal language. In the receptive domain, evidence from eyetracking studies increasingly shows that participants with HFA have subtle, qualitative differences in their scan paths for communicative facial expressions. Production of non-verbal communication in this population is still very poorly understood, but preliminary evidence points to expressions that are categorically accurate, but qualitatively awkward and less synchronous with verbal language than those of their typically developing (TD) peers. In a highly innovative approach the proposed project will quantify the qualitative differences of facial expression processing and production by adolescents with HFA. We will use eyetracking and motion-capture methodologies to record objective measures of facial expression production and processing and relate them to the subjective appearance of awkwardness recorded by TD peers. We will specifically aim to determine the contribution of an underlying verbal/non-verbal synchrony deficit in adolescents with HFA to this social communication awkwardness. Eyetracking and motion-capture data will be correlated with behavioral measures and diagnostic severity for each participant. Motion-capture data will also be correlated with judgments of awkwardness by na¿ve TD observers and will analyze qualitative components for expressive and receptive social communication skills and their synchrony with verbal language. The importance of this work lies in establishing the relationship between specific, quantifiable features of non-verbal communication and the social communication success of each participant with HFA, as measured by symptom severity and by qualitative perceptions of TD coders. We hypothesize that adolescents with HFA have reduced verbal/non- verbal synchrony in receptive and expressive modalities, and that individuals with higher ASD symptom severity will show increased asynchrony in receptive and expressive tasks. In addition to documenting fine- grained deficits, we will also ascertain whether individuals with HFA are able to improve their productions in response to temporal-spatial cueing. This component of our proposed project will ultimately lead to improved social communication intervention by creating more clearly defined intervention targets, such as verbal/nonverbal synchrony.