ABSTRACT
A 1977 Swiss case study is presented in English translation: a mute child with infantile autism is taught to speak starting at the relatively late age of 6. The author, who is the primary therapist and the child's father, details the conditioning procedure, discusses theoretical considerations in speech acquisition, and outlines the limits of the training. The author and translator update the child's status and add commentary.
Subject(s)
Autistic Disorder/psychology , Autistic Disorder/rehabilitation , Conditioning, Psychological , Language Therapy/psychology , Child , Follow-Up Studies , Humans , Language Therapy/methods , Male , Middle Aged , Speech Therapy/methods , Speech Therapy/psychology , TranslatingABSTRACT
Five cbronically aphasic subjects were trained on a computerized iconographic communication system (C-VIC). Their performance in producing single sentences scripts. and narratives was assessed using both spoken English and C-VIC. The requisite vocabulary necessary and the narrative complexity of the target productions were controlled. Subject performance using C-VIC indicates that the ability to construct discourse at the macrostructural level is largely intact. Despite significant improvements in spoken production after C-VIC training, especially at the single sentence level, the subjects' spoken discourse remains severely impaired by their failures at the microlinguistic level. These results point to the limits of currently available approaches to the remediation of aphasia and suggest avenues for future research.
Subject(s)
Aphasia/therapy , Language Therapy , Speech Production Measurement , Aged , Aphasia/diagnosis , Humans , Language Disorders/etiology , Language Tests , Language Therapy/instrumentation , Mental Recall , Middle Aged , Neuropsychological Tests , Speech Production Measurement/instrumentation , Therapy, Computer-Assisted/instrumentation , User-Computer Interface , Vocabulary , WritingABSTRACT
Restricted semantic fields and resultant stimulus overselectivity are often thought to be typical of low-functioning autism, as is a strong visual processing preference. However, these conclusions may in part be an artifact of testing methodology. A 12-year-old, low-functioning and nonverbal autistic boy was tested on an auditory word-to-picture selection task. The picture foils were chosen to have visual features, semantic features, both, or neither in common with the correct answer. Errors were made more often to semantically than to visually related items, and he showed generalization to items that had not been explicitly trained. This is taken as evidence that his semantic fields are broader than otherwise apparent, and that he was capable of expanding his semantic representations independently of specific training.
