Background and aims

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have been found to exhibit difficulties in wh-question production. It is unclear whether these difficulties are pragmatic or syntactic in nature. The current study used a question elicitation task to assess the production of subject and object wh-questions of children with ASD in two different languages (Hebrew and French) wherein the syntactic structure of wh-questions is different, a fact that may contribute to better understanding of the underlying deficits affecting wh-question production. Crucially, beyond the general correct/error rate we also performed an in-depth analysis of error types, comparing syntactic to pragmatic errors and comparing the distribution of errors in the ASD group to that of children with typical development (TD) and children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD).

Results

Correct production rates were found to be similar for the ASD and DLD groups, but error analysis revealed important differences between the ASD groups in the two languages and the DLD group. The Hebrew- and French ASD groups were found to produce pragmatic errors, which were not found in children with DLD. The pragmatic errors were similar in the two ASD groups. Syntactic errors were affected by the structure of each language.

Conclusions

Our results have shown that although the two ASD groups come from different countries and speak different languages, the correct production rates and more importantly, the error types were very similar in the two ASD groups, and very different compared to TD children and children with DLD.

Implications: Our results highlight the importance of creating research tasks that test different linguistic functions independently and strengthen the need for conducting fine-grained error analysis to differentiate between groups and gain insights into the deficits underlying each of them.

中文翻译：

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椰子和窗帘蛋糕：自闭症谱系障碍问题的产生

背景和目标

已发现患有自闭症谱系障碍 (ASD) 的儿童在提出问题时表现出困难。目前尚不清楚这些困难本质上是语用上的还是句法上的。目前的研究使用问题启发任务来评估ASD 儿童在两种不同语言（希伯来语和法语）中的主语和宾语wh问题的产生，其中wh问题的句法结构不同，这一事实可能有助于更好地了解影响wh的潜在缺陷-问题生产。至关重要的是，除了一般的正确/错误率之外，我们还对错误类型进行了深入分析，将句法错误与语用错误进行了比较，并将 ASD 组的错误分布与典型发育 (TD) 儿童和发育不良儿童的错误分布进行了比较语言障碍（DLD）。

结果

发现 ASD 和 DLD 组的正确生产率相似，但错误分析揭示了两种语言的 ASD 组与 DLD 组之间的重要差异。希伯来语和法语 ASD 组被发现会产生语用错误，这在 DLD 儿童中没有发现。两个 ASD 组的语用错误相似。句法错误受每种语言结构的影响。

结论

我们的结果表明，尽管两个 ASD 组来自不同的国家并使用不同的语言，但正确的生产率，更重要的是，两个 ASD 组的错误类型非常相似，与 TD 儿童和 DLD 儿童相比有很大不同.

启示：我们的结果强调了创建独立测试不同语言功能的研究任务的重要性，并加强了进行细粒度错误分析以区分群体并深入了解每个群体背后的缺陷的必要性。