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共病语言障碍（LI）。然而，LI的临床诊断本身不能识别相关的潜在神经元缺陷，考虑到观察到的LI的异质性，其可能发生在感知、处理和/或认知水平。目前的理解，如何在每个或任何这些水平的赤字可能与LI是不够复杂，以区分神经元为基础的亚型LI。这样的分类，一方面，复制现有的临床类别，或者，在另一方面，跨越临床诊断，而不是组在一起的语言障碍的个人，其潜在的神经元缺陷的性质。拟议的研究计划的成功实施将代表通过对年轻临床人群与通常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活动进行参数调查，确定LI亚型的进展。具体而言，将研究患有自闭症谱系障碍的儿童（伴或不伴LI）人群，以发现与自闭症本身和LI本身以及两者组合相关的神经元特征。因此，该提议的目标是定义与ASD中LI的神经相关物相关联的电生理学特征或内表型，以解决ASD诊断范围内的行为损伤的异质性（“异质性”问题）和不同诊断之间的行为损伤的明显重叠（“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).