ABSTRACT

Producing pronouns involves linguistic and social-cognitive knowledge because children must learn words and understand pronouns’ changing referents. This study examined pronoun production longitudinally in young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 15), whose social-cognition might impair pronoun use, and in typically developing (TD; n = 18) children. Modeling the effect of joint attention (JA; a social-cognitive factor) and a name bias (NB; a linguistic factor) revealed a positive relation between NB and second- and third-person pronouns for all children and a positive relation between JA and those pronouns in just the ASD group. Social-cognitive and linguistic processes affected the ability of children with ASD to use pronouns; TD children’s pronouns were related to linguistic skill and unaffected by JA.

摘要

代词的产生涉及语言和社会认知知识，因为儿童必须学习单词并理解代词不断变化的指称。这项研究纵向研究了自闭症谱系障碍（ASD；n = 15）的儿童的代词产生，其社交认知可能会损害代词的使用，而在典型发育阶段（TD；n= 18）个孩子。对联合注意力（JA；社会认知因素）和名字偏向（NB；语言因素）的影响进行建模，可以发现NB与所有儿童的第二人称和第三人称代词之间存在正相关，而JA和在ASD小组中的那些代词。社会认知和语言过程影响了自闭症儿童使用代词的能力；TD儿童的代词与语言能力有关，不受JA的影响。