Electrophysiological Signatures of Language Impairment in Autism Spectrum Disorde

描述(由申请人提供)：包括自闭症谱系障碍(ASD)在内的几种发育障碍的临床特征涉及不同程度的语言障碍(LI)。然而，LI的临床诊断本身并不能确定相关的潜在神经元缺陷(S)，鉴于LI的异质性，这种缺陷可能发生在感知、加工和/或认知水平上。目前对于这些水平上的缺陷如何与LI相关的理解还不够复杂，无法区分基于神经元的LI亚型。这样的分类一方面可以复制现有的临床类别，或者另一方面可以跨越临床诊断，而不是根据语言障碍个体潜在的神经元缺陷的性质将其分组在一起。拟议研究计划的成功实施将代表着在确定LI亚型方面的进展，该亚型是通过对年轻临床人群与典型发展中的同龄人在言语感知、处理和认知过程中诱发的神经磁性活动进行参数研究而确定的。具体地说，将调查一组患有自闭症谱系障碍的儿童(包括伴发和不伴发LI)，以找出与自闭症本身和LI本身相关的神经元特征，以及两者的组合。因此，这项建议的目标是定义与ASD中LI的神经相关性相关的电生理特征或内表型，以解决ASD诊断中跨光谱行为损害的异质性(“异质性”问题)和不同诊断之间行为损害的明显重叠(“重叠”问题)。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The clinical profiles of several developmental disorders, including autism spectrum disorders (ASD), involve varying degrees of comorbid language impairment (LI). Clinical diagnosis of LI, however, does not itself identify the associated underlying neuronal deficit(s), which may occur at the level of perception, processing, and/or cognition, given the observed heterogeneity of LI. Current understanding of how a deficit at each or any of these levels might relate to LI is not sufficiently sophisticated to distinguish neuronally-based subtypes of LI. Such classification may, on the one hand, reproduce existing clinical categories, or, on the other hand, cut across clinical diagnoses and instead group together language impaired individuals by the nature of their underlying neuronal deficit. Successful implementation of the proposed research program will represent progress towards delineating subtypes of LI identified via parametric investigation of evoked neuromagnetic activity during speech perception, processing, and cognition in young clinical populations vs. typically developing peers. Specifically a population of children with autism spectrum disorders (both with and without concomitant LI) will be investigated to find neuronal characteristics associated with both autism per se and LI per se, as well as in combination. As such, it is the goal of this proposal to define electrophysiological signatures, or endophenotypes, associated with the neural correlates of LI in ASD to address both the heterogeneity of the behavioral impairment across the spectrum within the diagnosis of ASD (the "heterogeneity" problem) and the apparent overlap in behavioral impairment between different diagnoses (the "overlap" problem).