ABSTRACT
This study investigated the relationship between structural language skills, and communication skills, adaptive behavior, and emotional and behavior problems in pre-school children with autism. Participants were aged 3-5 years with autism (n = 27), and two comparison groups of children with developmental delay without autism (n = 12) and typically developing children (n = 20). The participants were administered standardised tests of structural language skills, and parents completed the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales and the Developmental Behaviour Checklist. Results indicated that for children with autism, communication skills, and in particular receptive communication skills, were associated with social and daily living skills, and behavior problems. Receptive structural language skills were associated with expressive communication skills. There were no associations found between structural language skills and social or daily living skills, nor behavior problems. The results of this study suggest that communication skills are more closely linked to functional and behavioral outcomes in autism than structural language skills.
Subject(s)
Adaptation, Psychological , Autistic Disorder/psychology , Child Behavior/psychology , Child Language , Emotions , Language , Autistic Disorder/complications , Child Behavior Disorders/complications , Child Behavior Disorders/psychology , Child, Preschool , Developmental Disabilities/complications , Developmental Disabilities/psychology , Female , Humans , Language Development Disorders/complications , Language Development Disorders/psychology , MaleABSTRACT
This study investigated whether children with autism have atypical development of morphological and syntactic skills, including whether they use rote learning to compensate for impaired morphological processing and acquire grammatical morphemes in an atypical order. Participants were children aged from 3-6 years who had autism (n = 17), developmental delay without autism (n = 7), and typically-developing children (n = 19). Language samples were taken from participants during the administration of the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, and transcripts were coded using the Index of Productive Syntax, and for usage of Brown's grammatical morphemes. Participants were also administered an elicitation task requiring the application of inflections to non-words; the Wugs Task. The main finding of this study was that children with autism have unevenly developed morphological and syntactic sub-skills; they have skills which are a combination of intact, delayed, and atypical. It was also found that children with autism and children with developmental delays can acquire and use morphological rules. The implications of these findings are that, in order to maximize language acquisition for these children, clinicians need to utilize comprehensive language assessment tools and design interventions that are tailored to the child's strengths and weaknesses.
