自闭症儿童与普通儿童模仿能力的比较研究

A Comparative Study of the Imitation Ability between Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Children with Typical Development

模仿能力经常被作为自闭症儿童诊断的一项重要依据,但却很少有研究考察不同模仿任务可能存在诊断效度的差异。本研究选取4类模仿任务,对10名自闭症儿童和10名普通儿童进行模仿能力测试,其中工具行为模仿任务和目的意图模仿任务是以认知为导向的模仿任务,过度模仿任务和同步模仿任务是以社会交往为导向的模仿任务。结果表明:自闭症儿童和普通儿童在工具行为模仿任务和目的意图模仿任务上不存在显著差异,但是,自闭症儿童在过度模仿和同步模仿任务上的得分显著低于普通儿童。因此,未来在临床诊断中需要选择以社会交往为导向的模仿任务测查自闭症儿童的模仿能力以提高诊断有效性。

Imitation ability is often used as an important criteria for the diagnosis of children with autism spectrum disorder, but few studies have examined the possible differences in diagnostic validity between different imitation tasks. Four types of imitation tasks have been used in this study to conduct a comprehensive assessment of imitation abilities of 10 children with autism spectrum disorder and 10 children with typical development. Among these four tasks, the instrumental behavioral imitation task and the intention understanding imitation task are cognition-orientated. The over-imitation task and the synchronous imitation task are social-interaction-orientated. The results indicate that in the instrumental behavioral imitation task and the intention understanding imitation task, there is no significant difference between the scores of children with autism spectrum disorder and those of children with typical development. However, in the over-imitation task and the synchronous imitation task, the scores of children with autism spectrum disorder are significant lower than those of children with typical development. In the future, the imitation tasks which focus on children’s social communicative ability should be selected to assess the imitation ability of children with autism spectrum disorder for more effective clinical diagnosis.