1,720,968 research outputs found
A systematic investigation of written language processing in autism spectrum disorder
No full textAutism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition characterised by language processing differences. These differences are thought to impact upon reading skill and individuals with ASD are often reported to have reduced reading comprehension and inferencing accuracy, in comparison to typically developing (TD) controls. This thesis examined on-line linguistic processing differences that might underpin atypical reading performance in ASD by monitoring the eye movements of TD and ASD adults as they read text that included lexical, syntactic, semantic, and discourse manipulations.Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 demonstrated that the efficiency of lexical and syntactic processing is similar between TD and ASD readers, as evidenced by comparable word frequency and garden path effects. In contrast, Experiment 3 demonstrated that there is a differential time-course in the processing of situational world knowledge during reading between TD and ASD readers. However, no difference in the efficiency with which TD and ASD readers form co-referential links was found in Experiment 4. In addition, for each experiment, readers with ASD were found to engage in increased rereading, in comparison to TD readers, which is speculated to reflect a ‘cautious’ reading strategy.Collectively, the findings from these experiments demonstrate that in general, the language processing system is very similar between TD and ASD readers. However, individuals with ASD have a specific processing atypicality that is associated with the processing of situational world knowledge. Given that processing of such information is often essential for inferences to be formed and for readers to achieve global text coherence, it is likely that this processing difference contributes to previous reports of comprehension and inferential atypicalities in ASD. Collectively, these findings provide a novel contribution to our understanding of how linguistic processing during reading occurs onlinein individuals with ASD
Processing of co-reference in autism spectrum disorder
Full text linkAccuracy for reading comprehension and inferencing tasks has previously been reported as reduced for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), relative to typically developing (TD) controls. In this study, we used an eye movements and reading paradigm to examine whether this difference in performance accuracy is underpinned by differences in the inferential work required to compute a co-referential link. Participants read two sentences that contained a category noun (e.g., bird) that was preceded by and co-referred to an exemplar that was either typical (e.g., pigeon) or atypical (e.g., penguin). Both TD and ASD participants showed an effect of typicality for gaze durations upon the category noun, with longer times being observed when the exemplar was atypical, in comparison to typical. No group differences or interactions were detected for target processing, and verbal language proficiency was found to predict general reading and inferential skill. The only difference between groups was that individuals with ASD engaged in more re-reading than TD participants. These data suggest that readers with ASD do not differ in the efficiency with which they compute anaphoric links on-line during reading
Investigating the use of world knowledge during on-line comprehension in adults with autism spectrum disorder
Full text linkThe on-line use of world knowledge during reading was examined in adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Both ASD and typically developed (TD) adults read sentences that included plausible, implausible and anomalous thematic relations, as their eye movements were monitored. No group differences in the speed of detection of the anomalous violations were found, but the ASD group showed a delay in detection of implausible thematic relations. These findings suggest that there are subtle differences in the speed of world knowledge processing during reading in ASD
Benchmark eye movement effects during natural reading in autism spectrum disorder
Full text linkIn 2 experiments, eye tracking methodology was used to assess on-line lexical, syntactic and semantic processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In Experiment 1, lexical identification was examined by manipulating the frequency of target words. Both typically developed (TD) and ASD readers showed normal frequency effects, suggesting that the processes TD and ASD readers engage in to identify words are comparable. In Experiment 2, syntactic parsing and semantic interpretation requiring the on-line use of world knowledge were examined, by having participants read garden path sentences containing an ambiguous prepositional phrase. Both groups showed normal garden path effects when reading low-attached sentences and the time course of reading disruption was comparable between groups. This suggests that not only do ASD readers hold similar syntactic preferences to TD readers, but also that they use world knowledge on-line during reading. Together, these experiments demonstrate that the initial construction of sentence interpretation appears to be intact in ASD. However, the finding that ASD readers skip target words less often in Experiment 2, and take longer to read sentences during second pass for both experiments, suggests that they adopt a more cautious reading strategy and take longer to evaluate their sentence interpretation prior to making a manual respons
Looking, seeing and believing in autism: eye movements reveal how subtle cognitive processing differences impact in the social domain
No full textAdults with High Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) viewed scenes with people in them, while having their eye movements recorded. The task was to indicate, using a button press, whether the pictures were normal, or in some way weird or odd. Oddities in the pictures were categorized as violations of either perceptual or social norms. Compared to a Typically Developed (TD) control group, the ASD participants were equally able to categorize the scenes as odd or normal, but they took longer to respond. The eye movement patterns showed that the ASD group made more fixations and revisits to the target areas in the odd scenes compared with the TD group. Additionally, when the ASD group first fixated the target areas in the scenes, they failed to initially detect the social oddities. These two findings have clear implications for processing difficulties in ASD for the social domain, where it is important to detect social cues on-line, and where there is little opportunity to go back and recheck possible cues in fast dynamic interactions
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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