Abstract
The language samples of seven verbal autistic adolescents were analyzed. Linguistic deficits were compared to characteristics reported for preteen autistics and described structurally. Only four subjects demonstrated linguistic impairments. These clustered primarily in the area of prosodic features, semantic cooccurrence constraints and general disfluency. No such clustering had been reported for the preteen population. No correlation between linguistic deficits, IQ, and age was found. However, performance on the Seashore Test for Musical Ability correlated highly with linguistic performance. Results suggest that (a) autism includes linguistically, and possibly etiologically, distinct subgroups; (b) the basic linguistic deficits in autism may be more specific than thought previously; and (c) perception of prosodie features may be crucial for decoding and encoding linguistic signals. Autistic children may be lacking in this ability.
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This study was supported in part by the Maternal and Child Health Grant No. 927.
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Simmons, J.Q., Baltaxe, C. Language patterns of adolescent autistics. J Autism Dev Disord 5, 333–351 (1975). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01540680
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01540680