Abstract
Certain characteristics of the syntactic structures of the language of autistic children, such as their lack of mastery of pronomialization, have been described. It is proposed that further investigation of syntactic structures, particularly those related to deixis, may show a specific deviance in verbal autistic children. A pilot investigation of the production of tense markers in three autistic, three mentally retarded, and two normal children is reported. The testing for the production of tense inflections was done in a standardized structured test situation using pictures and toys. The transcripts were scored according to agreed-upon criteria for expecting the appearance of a certain tense form. Significant differences were found in the production of the past tense; the percent of correct responses was 80% for the normal children, 8% for the autistic subjects, and the mentally retarded subjects fell in between with 60%. It is concluded that the initial hypothesis of deviance of language acquisition in childhood autism, particularly in areas related to language deixis, is strengthened by the results.
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This study was supported by grant No. 5 S01 RR05590, from Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Ms. Lisa Barsky and Ms. Jessica Bondy of Swarthmore College assisted in data collection, transcript preparation, and scoring. Access to subjects was facilitated by The Developmental Center for Autistic Children, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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Bartolucci, G., Albers, R.J. Deictic categories in the language of autistic children. J Autism Dev Disord 4, 131–141 (1974). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02105366
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02105366