Characteristics of Language Disorder of Autistic Children : An Application of Luria's Aphasia Model

Abstract

Tested the hypothesis that autistic children have a language disorder similar to that described by A. R. Luria for patients with dynamic aphasia, which includes difficulties in recalling verbs and constructing sentences. In Exp I, 10 autistic 9–28 yr olds, 52 mentally retarded (MR) 7–25 yr olds, and 40 normal 6–20 yr olds performed sentence construction and logico-grammatical cognition tasks. Consistent with the hypothesis, autistic Ss had the lowest mean score on the sentence construction task. In Exp II, 20 autistic 7–18 yr olds, 20 MR 8–29 yr olds, and 36 normal 3–6 yr olds performed language tasks at the word and sentence levels. Again consistent with the hypothesis, the autistic Ss had the lowest mean score on picture predication tasks and performed better on nouns than on verbs. (English abstract) (16 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)