Language: The Problem Beyond Conditioning

Abstract

It is now widely accepted that disturbance of language is a central feature of childhood autism, despite continuing dispute concerning the nature of the language disturbance and how relevant it is to the panoply of symptoms displayed (Rutter, 1965,1968; Hermelin, 1968; Wing, 1969; Rutter et al., 1971; Halpern, 1971; Hermelin & Frith, 1971; Cobrinik, 1974; Bartak et al., 1975). A severe language disorder has been found in all autistic children studied by the author with an experimental nine-word language (9WL) and other procedures (Churchill, 1972, 1973). This language disorder, considered common to all autistic children, is proposed as a central explanatory concept to account for those behavioral features which autistic children have in common: the profound impairment of speech and gestures for communication, nonfunctional use of objects, and severe impairment of interpersonal relations. Other demonstrable deficits (of perception, memory, and motor integration) as well as, of course, special features of social history may better account for the ways in which autistic children differ among themselves. Be that as it may, this chapter is limited to a consideration of some special features of language disability which have become apparent in autistic children through detailed, systematic, hierarchical testing of language and those conditionable functions which subserve it. It will focus not on conditioning problems but on a higher level (syntactical?) language disorder with illustrations from just two autistic children in whom we could discern no evidence of difficulty in their basic conditionability using the 9WL.