A compreensão de orações relativas de sujeito com estado mental de emoção entre indivíduos com desenvolvimento típico e com transtorno do espectro do autismo

Abstract

Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to understand mental states, is considered indispensable in the establishment of social interactions and for the development of language. Wimmer and Perner (1983), Baron-Cohen, Leslie and Frith (1985) and Frith (1995) investigated the link between ToM, Specific Language Impairments (SLI) and the Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), seeking to find relations of interdependence. Individuals diagnosed with ASD have delays in the processing of ToM, which may, according to our hypothesis, result in difficulties regarding the understanding of statements that express mental states of emotion. To investigate this possibility, we studied children with mild ASD and compared their results with a control group. We performed the ToM Scale (Wellman and Liu, 2004) to assess the ToM level of our groups, as well as an experimental task. The task consisted in matching a sentence the participants heard with the corresponding figure (target) among other three figures, in which one competed with the target and the other two were distractors. The ocular movement of all participants was recorded. The sentences were manipulated regarding the position of the adjective that expressed the mental state. Therefore, we had two experimental conditions: adjective in the relative sentence and the adjective in the main sentence. The results suggest a correlation between the ToM level and the reaction time of each group. The ASD group shows a different ocular movement pattern than the control group, according to the metrics recorded. As it is pointed out in the literature, there is a relationship between ToM and ASD, as well as between ToM and SLI. Our interest was to investigate whether in autism the possible difficulties of processing the relative clauses would have some similarity to the processing in SLI. The search for evidence of SLI in patients with mild ASD or highly functional autism has the adequate and precise final objective of understanding the pathology in hopes of producing appropriate educational material for this population.