ABSTRACT
Young, severely maladaptive autistic children with some speech competence were compared to normally developing 3-year-old children of lower and middle class and 5-year-olds of lower class on negation tasks. All subjects were shown 12 sets of cards depicting negative contrasts designed to elicit semantic categories of nonexistence, denial, and rejection and were tested for production, imitation, and comprehension. Syntactic and semantic analysis revealed that autistic children were superior imitators and poor producers but showed skills in comprehension comparable to a 4-year-old's level of functioning. While retarded in some functions, the experimental group produced syntactic structures that were more rigid, suggesting the significantly greater use of imitation as a major strategy in linguistic coding.
Subject(s)
Autistic Disorder/psychology , Concept Formation , Psycholinguistics , Child, Preschool , Humans , Language DevelopmentABSTRACT
In human beings, amphetamine can induce both schizophreniform psychosis and oral-facial dyskinesia resembling tardive dyskinesia, while neuroleptic agents reduce the manifestations of both conditions. This suggests that such psychosis and movement disorder may occur by the same or very similar mechanisms. It is thought that tardive dyskinesia may result from neuroleptic-induced denervation hypersensitivity to dopamine. The author cites evidence suggesting that amphetamine may act on dopaminergic pathways in the CNS to produce a denervation hypersensitivity like that caused by neuroleptic agents. Clinical evidence compatible with a denervation hypersensitivity hypothesis of schizophrenia is then discussed.