Background & AimsMany young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate striking delays in early vocabulary development. Experimental studies that teach the meanings of novel nonwords can determine the effects of linguistic and attentional factors. One factor that may affect novel referent selection in children with ASD is visual perceptual salience—how interesting (i.e., striking) stimuli are on the basis of their visual properties. The goal of the current study was to determine how the perceptual salience of objects affected novel referent selection in children with ASD and children who are typically developing (TD) of similar ages (mean age 3–4 years).MethodsUsing a screen-based experimental paradigm, children were taught the names of four unfamiliar objects: two high-salience objects and two low-salience objects. Their comprehension of the novel words was assessed in low-difficulty and high-difficulty trials. Gaze location was determined from video by trained research assistants.ResultsContrary to initial predictions, findings indicated that high perceptual salience disrupted novel referent selection in the children with ASD but facilitated attention to the target object in age-matched TD peers. The children with ASD showed no significant evidence of successful novel referent selection in the high-difficulty trials. Exploratory reaction time analyses suggested that the children with autism showed “stickier” attention—had more difficulty disengaging (i.e., looking away)—from high-salience distracter images than low-salience distracter images, even though the two images were balanced in salience for any given test trial.Conclusions and Clinical ImplicationsThese findings add to growing evidence that high perceptual salience has the potential to disrupt novel referent selection in children with ASD. These results underscore the complexity of novel referent selection and highlight the importance of taking the immediate testing context into account. In particular, it is important to acknowledge that screen-based assessments and screen-based learning activities used with children with ASD are not immune to the effects of lower level visual features, such as perceptual salience.

中文翻译：

---

有和没有自闭症谱系障碍儿童的视觉知觉显着性和新的参照物选择

背景与目标许多患有自闭症谱系障碍 (ASD) 的幼儿在早期词汇发展方面表现出明显的延迟。教授新的非词意义的实验研究可以确定语言和注意力因素的影响。可能影响 ASD 儿童新参照物选择的一个因素是视觉感知显着性——基于视觉特性的刺激有多有趣（即引人注目）。本研究的目的是确定物体的感知显着性如何影响 ASD 儿童和相似年龄（平均年龄 3-4 岁）的典型发育 (TD) 儿童的新参照物选择。方法使用基于屏幕的实验在范例中，孩子们被教导了四种不熟悉的物体的名称：两个高显着性物体和两个低显着性物体。他们对新词的理解在低难度和高难度试验中进行评估。凝视位置由训练有素的研究助理根据视频确定。结果与最初的预测相反，研究结果表明，高知觉显着性扰乱了自闭症儿童的新参照物选择，但促进了年龄匹配的 TD 同龄人对目标对象的关注。患有 ASD 的儿童在高难度试验中没有显示成功的新参照物选择的重要证据。探索性反应时间分析表明，与低显着性干扰物图像相比，自闭症儿童表现出“粘性”注意力——更难以从高显着性干扰物图像中脱离（即移开视线），即使这两个图像在显着性方面是平衡的任何给定的测试试验。结论和临床意义这些发现增加了越来越多的证据，表明高感知显着性有可能破坏 ASD 儿童的新参照物选择。这些结果强调了新的参考对象选择的复杂性，并强调了考虑即时测试环境的重要性。特别是，重要的是要承认，用于 ASD 儿童的基于屏幕的评估和基于屏幕的学习活动不能免受较低级别视觉特征（如知觉显着性）的影响。