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| Language
in Autism |
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This
project is part of an autism program project that began in 1997. It
is funded by NIDCD, and is part of the Collaborative Programs of Excellence
in Autism. This project's current funding period extends through 2007.
Project Aims
Deficits in the domain of pragmatics are universally found in autism.
Our ongoing research has shown that these pragmatic deficits are closely
related to theory of mind impairments in children with autism. We
have also found that even among relatively high-functioning children
with autism, many demonstrate less animated facial expressions during
speech. While we have shown that children with autism are able to
use cues from prosody (intonation) and basic facial expressions within
the confines of a research task, more work needs to be done to see
how well these children can integrate facial expressions with language,
and whether their apparent competence extends to more complex facial
expression tasks. We also seek to quantify and objectively describe
the facial expressions produced by children with autism and their
typically developing peers through detailed coding and comparative
analyses.
We are currently following up these findings in a series of experiments
on language and facial expression integration skills in children with
autism and normal controls, aged between 10 and 17 years. The current
experiments investigate:
- The ability to use emotional facial expressions to assist in
the understanding of sentences with emotional content.
- The differential response to familiar versus unfamiliar faces
within the context of a language task.
- The ability to recognize and recreate the sequence of emotional
and speech facial expressions.
- The use of emotional facial expressions during conversation
when listening and speaking.
- The physical and temporal features of emotional and conversational
facial expressions.
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