English-speaking autistic children use the hesitation marker um less often than non-autistic children but use uh at a similar rate. It is unclear why this is the case. We employed a sample of Dutch-speaking children from the Preschool Brain Imaging and Behavior Project to examine hesitation markers in autistic and non-autistic preschoolers with the aim to 1) make a crosslinguistic comparison of hesitation marker usage and 2) examine hypotheses regarding the underlying linguistic mechanisms of hesitation markers: the symptom hypothesis and the signal hypothesis. We found initial group differences in all hesitation markers but these results were rendered insignificant after controlling for age, sex and nonverbal cognition. We found significant correlations between hesitation marker usage and expressive and receptive language, but not autism traits. Lastly, we show interesting cross-linguistic differences in hesitation marker usage between Dutch-speaking participants and previously described English-speaking participants, such as a preference for um over uh.

中文翻译：

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自闭症中的“呃”和“嗯”：荷兰语自闭症学龄前儿童犹豫标记使用情况


英语自闭症儿童使用犹豫标记 um 的频率低于非自闭症儿童，但使用 uh 的频率相似。目前还不清楚为什么会出现这种情况。我们采用了来自学前班大脑成像和行为项目的荷兰语儿童样本来检查自闭症和非自闭症学龄前儿童的犹豫标记，目的是 1) 对犹豫标记的使用进行跨语言比较，2) 检查有关潜在的假设犹豫标记的语言机制：症状假说和信号假说。我们发现所有犹豫标记都存在最初的群体差异，但在控制年龄、性别和非语言认知后，这些结果变得微不足道。我们发现犹豫标记的使用与表达性和接受性语言之间存在显着相关性，但与自闭症特征无关。最后，我们展示了荷兰语参与者和之前描述的英语参与者在犹豫标记使用方面有趣的跨语言差异，例如更喜欢 um 而不是 uh。