Understanding the language and communicative impairments in autism

Publisher Summary This chapter explains the language and communicative impairments in autism. Children with autism show delays and deficits in the acquisition of language that range from the almost complete absence of functional communication to adequate linguistic knowledge, but impairments in the use of that knowledge in conversation or other discourse contexts. Clinical documentation of suprasegmental aspects of the speech of children with autism has described their voice quality and intonation patterns as strikingly atypical and these problems appear to persist through adulthood. Prosodic deficits may also be related to the difficulties in planning and producing complex utterances that require the integration of phonological, morphosyntactic, semantic, and discourse-level information. The findings suggest that for the child with autism word meanings are acquired in a highly systematic and constrained way. The data are consistent with the view that lexical development in autism, as in typically developing and other children with developmental disorders, is constrained by a set of developmental operating principles.

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